Dad hired people with chainsaws to cut down the large maple tree in our backyard when I was away at college. He didn’t like the mess in the spring when the tree flushed green and rained down its tadpole seeds. Pinocchio seeds. The ones that spin as they fall to the ground. Helicopter seeds. He said they smothered the grass and clogged the gutters. But you taught me to crack the head of each green seed, piercing the fleshy bulb with my nails to reveal its gooey insides. We stuck them on our noses as we walked side by side. The smell of sap and your perfume live together in my memory.

I am filled with the childhood you grew for me:

The window, larger than the largest flat-screen TV Dad points to in the Best Buy catalog. So large it invites me to jump into its maw. So large it doesn’t open. Through the window, I can see the church, grey-bricked and salt-worn, and the sea, dotted with white sailboats. The water sparks alive, glimmering like the diamonds Mom wears. In the winter I fog the glass with my breath to draw hearts and stars, finger smudges you’ll wipe off with a crumpled page of newspaper and a single spurt of Windex.

The blush-pink six-by-four marble inlay at the bottom of the first-floor stairs. When the tile is warm and I spin on my toes, barefoot because I’m afraid I’ll slip wearing socks, the stone becomes my ballroom. I make up a waltz and practice my gymnastics routine. I yell for you to watch me dance. You sit on the stairs, knees tucked into your chest, dust cloth folded between your hands. Lilac terry cloth capris rise even higher on your legs, exposing amethyst veins and amber spots, proof that you’ve been dancing far longer than I have.

A sun-bleached armchair on the second floor of your house is where we take our naps. Skylights punctuate the ceiling, bathing our bodies in heat and pouring down streaks of sun that illuminate dust motes and the perpetual red of your cheeks. You like to eat crackers smothered in chunky peanut butter. Together we enjoy the salty-sweet taste of our snack before we lie stomach to stomach and breathe. I’m alone when I wake, but like whale song, the clink-clink-clinking of ceramic plates tells me where you are.

The cellar stairs with open risers lead to a concrete floor. You do laundry in the basement and I sit at the very top and listen to the drumming of the washing machine. When I’m brave and bored I descend the stairs with you. It’s too narrow to go hand in hand, side by side, so I follow you, my feet after your feet, trusting you to keep me from tumbling down into the dark. I help you with the laundry. The single, naked lightbulb swings above us as we fold towels and try to match socks.

The lazy Susan with canned pears and microwave popcorn. I am always hungry. So hungry I eat seated on the floor in front of the still open cabinet. I crack the pull tab of the can—sipping the nectar, more sugar than real juice, so I can better see the skinned pear halves. I dive in fork- first and am encouraged by the dull tap-tap-tap of tongs skimming the can’s ridged aluminum sides. The syrup-soaked fruit makes my mouth sticky and summer-warm as I suck the flesh from the back of my teeth.

This summer, the whole house sang with your presence: your footsteps, your whistling laugh, your creaking joints. (I don’t believe in ghosts.) The maple trees had already dropped their seeds. The gutters no longer flood. I returned home to a tree stump and its eighty-nine rings.

Jade Chin currently attends Emerson College in Boston, MA as a graduate student pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. Since graduating from the University of Maryland in 2022, Jade has interned with Autumn House Press, worked for The Rumpus, and read for Split Lip Magazine. Fiction work of hers has been published in Twelve Winters Journal. Until her next adventure, she travels between MA and MD, splitting her time between her two cats that don’t get along.