Karina Dove Escobar

these seasons have appetites

Autumn. The season of gratitude and preparedness, of plenitude and imminent scarcity, the season when the trees transition to their homes beneath the earth, reinhabiting their shadow-selves and root-branches, strengthening their grip on deeply buried stones. And so, the ground is shifting. You can feel it ever-so-slightly as it rumbles and groans, a tiny dose of vertigo as the terrain welcomes home inhabitants of another hibernation. Some spirits keep living while others depart. So many creatures discard their bodies, their souls floating about in the spiced air. As I walk, I sneeze on many mosquito-souls, cicada-souls, the chilled and stilled duties of a butterfly.

There is the crunchiness of ephemerality underfoot, a tell-tale dryness before the snow crystals drift in. Urgency fills the air. Be grateful now. Be grateful immediately. Be grateful or regret it when everything is bland and holding its breath. I watch the tulip poplar outside my porch thin like a balding man. It feels like I was just standing beneath his pregnant branches, watching the buds unfurl.

Once there was a lady who froze to death one Autumn further north. She found herself suspended in the air with all the creatures and neglected potted plants who died on the same night. She wondered why she ever feared death, for on that night she was lucky to die when everything else was dying, and it was like attending a gala. As she masqueraded about with her new friend, a jumping spider, she shivered at the thought of those pitiful souls who died in the newborn Spring.

Spring can be wicked, that way. Undeniably alive. Technically, my mother died in the Spring. She had Winter-anxiety her entire life. So, when she was dying, I prayed she’d see another Spring. Yet as April approached, Winter stubbornly gnawed on Spring’s neck, lapping up all the fertility and flowers. In turn, Winter felt immortal and Spring’s remaining blood moved hypothermically, a crawl of icebergs, the preserved leaves on our lawns still trapped in a matrix of freeze and thaw.

Mom died so close to May, yet Winter was so stubborn, digging its heels in to claim her. I hope they were able to parse out some peace. Maybe after an angry initial outburst, Mom and Winter were able to enjoy each other’s company for the first time. No longer able to feel the cold’s sting, maybe she could hold Winter’s hand, letting it lead her across each prism and sparkle of an icy lawn, across the crackle of a spiderwebbed lake surface. Maybe she could find comfort in Winter’s dark presence and remember how it feels to be unborn, remember all the things we forgot in the womb. Like a fetus floating in the dark, she could remember all those mysteries, reunite with all those wordless truths, just as she became a wordless truth, too.

I found out I was pregnant in the Spring. Six years after my mother’s death and almost 2,000 miles from my hometown, twin parallel lines bloomed on the pregnancy test just as the pink evening primroses bloomed in all the yellow, drought-scorched fields, making even the lowliest patches on the side of the highway look pee-splattered and full of hCG. Those lines bloomed before I could look away. They were so sure of themselves, firm and straight and bold as the pillars of a temple. There was a line for each embryo, a line for each clump I carried, with each of their quickly differentiating cells. Like lions poised at the entrance of some grand and intimidating estate, they said: Welcome.

To be pregnant in the Spring is to eavesdrop on the gossip of the birds, to beat them to the nest just as they start collecting their grasses and bits of moss. To be pregnant in the Spring is to walk beneath the clouds of eager pollen, red-eyed and runny-nosed, already fertilized.

There I was, walking a track round and round as I grew rounder and rounder by the second. My ephemerally flat belly already felt heavy with new responsibility, wondering at what entities my body was busy snatching from the ether. My womb felt more tangible, more concrete than ever before. I walked belly-button forward, hoping to be a good host, a caring and hospitable sanctuary for those two souls who decided to call my body home.

In Texas, Spring isn’t gnawed-on by Winter, it’s devoured by Summer. It isn’t savored in the blue-lipped, clingy way of a prolonged Winter but in the frantic pursuit of prey and panther. Here, Spring escapes into Winter, sprinting and darting to avoid Summer’s teeth, but Summer is huge and hungry. Summer finds Spring every time. This pursuit ends in gristle and bone shards. This pursuit is becoming the norm.

Appetites are hot, sweltering things. Appetites are fiery. Appetites are the densest, angriest negative spaces I know. Summer’s presence here is oppressive. Summer sits on your face without asking, Summer spits in your eye and even that burns. Summer hugs you without your permission. Summer holds you and won’t let go, and when Summer finally does, Summer decides to eat Autumn on its way out.

My twins are due to emerge in this sliver of the Autumn-that’s-left, if they nail the landing. If Summer decides to save some leftovers for next year’s lunch. And despite all the changes, I can’t help but marvel at this rare thing, this womb thing, this tick-tick-Boom thing, in a season that barely exists. To be almost a mother is to be almost emptied. To be a mother is to exist outside of yourself. Outside, the seasons are consuming each other.

Yet, Autumn remains unhurried. Autumn will do as Autumn does, confident in its small deaths in the right doses in the right places. Another word for Autumn is senescence. Another word for senescence is maturity. Autumn isn’t scared like Spring is. I can’t help but crave this fearlessness. I crave it like I crave iron. I crave it like I crave being mothered. What is a mother-to-be to do? Balance. Let me take some life from Autumn, too. And when the feasting is through, when the seasons are finished, may Autumn find me here, ready to reciprocate.

Karina Dove Escobar is a Colombian American writer from the New England area. She is currently living in Japan with her husband and twin toddlers. You can find her other words in Grim & Gilded, Planet Scumm, The Rappahannock Review, and upcoming in Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Blue Earth Review, and NUNUM's 2025 Opolis Anthology.

Karina wrote the following about her story:

There is a blurry territory called magical realism that I find myself drawn to, time and time again. While writing this piece, I gave myself permission to let go, to let genres blend, to let my autobiographia mingle with the magical in a world made more animate. Writing this piece helped me process the experience of living in a vibrant yet brutal Anthropocenic world. Writing this piece helped me cherish and preserve my own life seasons as I traverse them.