Horsetail Girl by Anemone

The last day of their trip to Florida, the day she turned nine, Masha found a woman buried under one of the she-oaks. A tall tree, much taller than the mangroves and palmettos around it, its fine, frail branchlets sashaying across Mashaʼs field of view. The gray sand beneath it was studded with white plastic trash, like bones. A plastic bag billowed from a pipe at the base of the tree, and when Masha put her hand to the pipe and felt warm air, she knew someone was breathing at the other end.

Her mothers didnʼt feel it (they always thought I was lying). Theyʼd driven out to the mangroves with grandpa to take them all kayaking and didnʼt want her to hold everything up with her stories, so they told her to stop making a fuss, told her she was too old to cry over imaginary people. Yue looked so disappointed (she had just renamed herself, our mothers were fighting about it). It made her hate her mothers, how they expected her to get in a kayak with them while her eyes were still red and someone was suffocating under the tree. So when they saw storm clouds and paddled back up the tidal inlet, when grandpaʼs car wouldnʼt start, when mom (Rebecca, we still spoke then) and ma (Feng, the police hadnʼt murdered her yet) and grandpa (William, he had dementia but no one talked about it) told her and Yue to entertain themselves while they got the kayak renter to look at the engine, Masha waited until Yue was deep in her book, grabbed her plastic shovel, and ran for the trees.

She wanted to invite Yue along, but Yue couldn't handle it. She didnʼt want mom and ma to get angry at her too. (Would I have saved her, if I'd brought her with me?)

The tree was growing only a foot above the inlet; the sand was damp at the surface, almost spongy beneath. A tangle of wiry roots and bleached plastic vermicelli came up under her red blade, whipping little arcs of wet sand into her hair and eyes as she knelt to scrape at the base of the pipe. The sand got in her hair. (I still had long hair then. I shaved it when we got home. Ma thought it was funny but Rebecca got so mad she threw a plate at the wall. Like I had to be a girl because she was too miserable to admit she wanted to be a man. She asked me if I wanted everyone at school to call me names. I said, what names?)

She could feel the collar of her t-shirt chaffing where it had soaked up sweat. She had a necklace on, too (grandpaʼs gift, Rebecca made me wear it); the silver chain itched at the base of her hairline, as bad as the constellations of mosquito bites on her ankles. One foot down and she was digging with her fingernails, which were ragged from biting and hurt to use where thin layers of nail, not detached from the edge, caught on every surface and teased the delicate nerves of her fingers. Soon her nails were black with grit and grime. As she dug deeper they scraped against unglazed pottery with a sound so hideous it made the acid in her stomach rush up the back of her throat. She tasted cake and orange juice and bile. She raised her nails to her nose and smelled the orange beeswax that joined the filthy pipe to a clay jar beneath the sand. Both jar and pipe were slicked brown with mold.

She clawed at the edges of the pit, trying to uncover more of the pot, to find a lid or a latch, anything to open it, to get the person out. Nothing. She grabbed the pipe, hands slipping on the mold, called again, loud as she dared. (I didnʼt want our mothers to come running. Even to rescue her. I wanted her all to myself. I wanted to gloat: Look who I found!) No answer. She scraped the mold and the beeswax, pulled again. The pot cracked; her bare feet felt the clay fracture and shift before her ears heard the sound. The pot opened below her and the sand followed her in, streaming down to choke her scream, blind her eyes.

In the sand and saltwater and broken pottery at the bottom of the pot she felt a hand passing over her body, heard each loud breath (I donʼt remember if they were hers or mine) echo off the clay walls. She had brought a flashlight, she remembered that. Because she was afraid, she pretended to be a soldier, and ordered herself to pull it out and turn it on, fast as she could. That was what she always did to keep herself from being indecisive. (I was cruel then. To myself. To everyone, except Yue.)

The first thing Masha noticed was that the woman was sitting up. She thought that sheʼd be lying down, with her face close to the crack in the pot, like she was in a coffin. Instead she was sitting at the bottom of a space the size of a refrigerator––Masha had never imagined a clay pot so big––with her legs crossed, looking not up, but ahead. She was naked, her skin mottled purple and yellow with bruises, damp and smelling of seaweed. Behind her, the wall of the pot was cracked, and fine, thin filaments of root had slithered through, and seemed to have twisted around her arms. Masha looked closer. The roots had pushed little suckers into her flesh, watery blood and thick yellow pus oozing from her body where they tugged and tore her skin. As she moved the roots fought her, pulling her closer, and the air began to stink of iron and yeast, like slabs of cheese cured in blood. The womanʼs hair was not hair, but branchlets, like the branchlets of the she-oak above them, the leaves reduced to tiny scales.

(I donʼt remember what I said. I know I didnʼt scream. I surprised myself, not screaming.)

“Give me your shirt,” said the woman. A tiny but insistent voice. Hoarse as a rasp.

Masha stared as the woman lifted her ankle. It hurt to touch, a sharp sickening pain that radiated all the way up Mashaʼs leg to the place above her thigh. (I tried never to talk about that part of myself even then.) The cut on her sole was long enough that Masha could see where the blood was running up her shin, soaking through her jeans, thin rivulets of it curving around the sides of her foot to trickle across the top. 

“Your shirt. To bandage your foot.”

Masha took off her shirt. She put on a brave face as she watched the woman wrap her foot.

“Who are you?” said Masha.

(I didn't say that. I cried silently. I thought that if I screamed she would kill me.)

“Sad,” said the woman. “Sad, strange child. Can't talk to anyone but her sister. You're going to lose her. I see it.”

“No,” said Masha. “No, no—”

“Bring her here. I will—help—both of you.”

“No,” said Masha. “Yue's safe. I came here to rescue you.” (I said that. I said I wanted to rescue her. Like I was a knight or a cowboy or some other kind of man from the movies that I loved.)

The woman smiled. Her laugh sounded like matchsticks breaking.

“You canʼt stay here!” said Masha. “Youʼll die!”

“When the tree dies, yes, I will die. But as long as it lives––it is so peaceful.”

She was smiling. Her eyes were wide and wet.

“So peaceful,” she said. “Fearful child. So scared. So sad. Your sister is sad too. Only just learned she's a girl. Can't even wear a dress. Bring her here. With me. You won't ever be afraid––that anyone will take her away from you.”

“No,” said Masha. “No, you can't have her––“

“Please––let me show––what I can do––”

(I started screaming.)

“Masha! Masha!”

When she opened her eyes again they were pulling her away from the tree by her armpits. Over the crash of rain on the tidal inlet and the roar of the wind in the mangroves and the steady purr of grandpaʼs repaired car and mom and ma shouting about how she needed to go to the ER and get stitches, she heard her grandpa saying, “I told you not play in the sand out there barefoot, thereʼs so much broken glass, so many old bones, you want an infection?”

(His brother had died of tetanus. 1938, they lived in a slum in Cleveland. When I knew him he was the cleanest man Iʼd ever met.)

The next day, foot stitched up, she talked about it like it happened a hundred years ago, to another girl, in another country. As their plane took off she told Yue how she dug down into the sand and found a woman there, a strange woman who was grafted into the roots of the tree, and offered her magic. (Yue was so scared. She cried while I screamed. She thought I was going to bleed to death.) She told Yue the story over and over again, long after Yue stopped asking for it, long after her mothers stopped reminding her that it hadnʼt happened.

(I left out the part where I was scared. And after that, the part where the woman opened herself up along the sternum with one nail, as she pulled her ribs open to show me what the roots were doing to her inside, how they pushed into her lungs and her guts, I left out what I felt then. I donʼt know what to call it. It was like disgust, but more. I pissed myself, but I thought, she looks happy, she looks so happy. She told me to touch her. She was warm. She was rotting but she was still warm. I was dying, she said, but I lived again. Through her. Through her roots. I carved myself into her and now I am alive again. Let me show you. If you won't save your sister then remember this. Remember that one day you will be sad and sick like me, when you outlive everyone.)

She told Yue: “The woman said, stay down here, with me, and Iʼll teach you magic, like I have, and you wonʼt ever be sad or scared again!”

(I wanted Yue to be safe. I remember I thought that. Itʼs the only thing I remember thinking. I thought, Iʼm so glad Yue isnʼt here. And then I was sad, because I thought, who will protect her when I die?)

“But I said no. I asked her if Yue could have magic, and she said no, and I said, I donʼt want anything Yue doesnʼt have.”

(Outliving Yue is the punishment I deserve. I never protected her. Not when the boys called her a faggot. Not when Rebecca hit her. Not the cops who took her away because ma finally let her wear a dress.)

“Can I sit by the window now?” said Yue. “I like looking at Florida from the sky.”

They changed seats. Masha thought, again, about the woman, about how happy she looked. (A year later I came for the first time, in the shower. I was pretending to be a boy in my head, but when I opened my eyes I saw my face in the mirror and I thought, I look like that woman who opened up her own ribs.)

“You like looking out the window,” said Masha. “But the last time you did it, you couldnʼt stop puking!”

She laughed, but Yue didnʼt. Yue looked like she was going to cry, but she didnʼt do that, either. Yue hadnʼt cried since their mothers told her she couldnʼt wear a dress to school. Masha wanted to punch herself for making her look sad. She wanted to punch their mothers, too. She wanted to call mom a bully and she wanted to call ma a coward because ma never stopped mom.

(Ma wasn't a coward. They had to kill her to take Yue from her.)

“Iʼm sorry,” said Masha. (I wanted to say, you shouldnʼt be so sensitive.) She hesitated, then said, “I love you.” It felt stupid, but she knew she was supposed to say it. It wasnʼt a lie.

Yue kept looking out the window. “Theyʼre invasive plants,” she said. “But theyʼre beautiful.”

“What?”

“The casuarinas. She-oaks, I mean. But casuarina equisetifolia is prettier.”

(I loved her for that. How she used big words and never assumed I didnʼt know them too.)

“What does that mean?”

“Horsetail tree.”

Masha nodded. “Theyʼre my favorite, too.”

Yue took her hand and pulled her close, as if she were afraid their mothers would overhear them.

“Donʼt go off on your own like that again,” she said. “Take me with you.”

“I will.”

(The next year, they passed a law in Florida that made it unsafe for Yue to go there. Ma wanted to leave the country by then, but Rebecca convinced her to stay, told her that New York would be safe. So Ma took Yue to visit her own parents in Flushing, and Rebecca took me to visit grandpa alone.)

Anemone is a writer based in Washington, DC. Her work has previously been published in Smoke and Mold, Lilac Peril, Writing Badly, and TRANSplants Zine, and is forthcoming in Beltway: An Anthology of Writers from the Washington, DC Metro Area (Night Ginkgo Press). Her first chapbook, American Rusalka, is forthcoming from Test Pie Press in Fall 2026. You can find her on Instagram (@anemonefrances) and Bluesky (@anemonebythesea).