Spread the Sheets
by Lydia Gwyn
Let the hard prey of the land hang loose from your mouth. Let the water swell to fill the hole. My son, you dig and dig, past the leafy, loamy layer and into the clay. Red mud covers your hands and the shovel handle. It covers your tennis shoes, the legs of your jeans. Earthly palms release rocks. You know the ones, can tell the geodes, round and white as new potatoes. Let what you knew as a child swim back to you–the pleasure of finding. How your hands would shake there in the creek with the overturned rocks at the sight of a salamander waiting in a wet leaf. You might find frog eggs, like soft eyeballs, or you might find another kind of salamander with the red earth pressed into the pillow of its memory. Stonefly larva, a minnow’s pin-pricked gills. All the fallen things of the forest softening like bread in the water. Let the world tell you what you already know, that you can be lonely and enjoy being alone. That you can make your bed and be in it at the same time, blankets ballooning over you. That you can be almost fully-grown and spend a day digging a hole and when you’re done feel the need to return to it again and again, peering into the water that bubbles up. What will come, what will come? My beautiful boy in your father’s blue work shirt with the sun on your back, a curl of cold inside you.
Lydia Gwyn’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review, F(r)iction, Kaleidocoped, JMWW, Elm Leaves Journal, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of two flash fiction collections: You’ll Never Find Another (Matter Press, 2021) and Tiny Doors (Another New Calligraphy, 2018). She lives in East Tennessee with her family. Find her online at lydiagwyn.wordpress.com.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Spread the Sheets”? This piece was inspired by my 14-year-old son and the day he was tasked with digging a hole on our property for a pond. When my husband and I bought our first home, it ticked nearly all the boxes of everything we needed and wanted. It had hardwood floors, it had enough acreage that we could have a decent summer garden, it had enough bedrooms that we could spare one for a sculpting studio for my husband, and it was in the woods. However, it didn’t have the one thing my son really wanted–a creek or a pond. Not too many years before we purchased the house, we rented a cabin on 20-forested acres in New Jersey. The property had a creek and a small waterfall, as well as a large pond that was full of bullfrogs, green frogs, and eastern spotted newts. My son spent every chance he could, wading in the water looking for frogs and salamanders. We decided soon after buying our home, we’d put in a pond. We located a couple of good spots for this in the woods, and my son broke ground on the future pond one summer afternoon. Digging a hole that large is hard, backbreaking labor, so my husband and son took turns working on it. About an hour into the first day of digging, my son noticed water from underground pooling up to fill in the hole. He worked on the hole for hours that day, returning to it after dinner and then again the next day. He thought for certain he’d found some sort of aquifer or spring. We’re still working on the pond. The hole is much bigger now and underground water continues to fill it. I wrote this piece not too many weeks after my son started digging the pond. There was some about that day and my son’s excitement over finding water underground that I wanted to capture in a poem or a flash piece.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
06/01 • TBD
06/08 • TBD
06/15 • TBD
06/22 • TBD
06/29 • TBD
07/06 • TBD
07/13 • TBD
07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD