By Katelynn Humbles
The first home I ever knew smelled of oranges and salt.
My mother was a house of soft hands, of arms that wrapped around me like vines—steady, constant. She pressed cool palms to my forehead when I burned, shaped her love into something
I could carry: peeled clementines, handed to me in bright, sweet sections, her fingers stained with citrus.
She was warmth, a sunlit kitchen, the hum of an old radio crackling through the morning. In the backyard, she coaxed life from the soil—clementines, lemons, figs—tending them with the same careful devotion she gave to me. In the summer, she sliced ripe nectarines over the sink, juice slipping down her wrists as she passed me half. Her love was something I could taste. When she brushed my hair, her fingers wove through it like roots threading deep into the earth. She was safe. The kind of love that asked for nothing, that simply was.
But the sky does not spare even the most patient garden.
Over the years, the softness in my mother hardened. Her hands, once gentle, grew rough with calluses, her touch no longer lingering but brisk. Efficient. She pruned too much, cut things back until nothing was left to grow. Her voice sharpened, edged with words I couldn’t swallow without them splintering. Some losses are slow, creeping things, measured not in sudden disasters but in the quiet erosion of tenderness.
One winter, she stopped peeling my clementines. Left them whole in the fruit bowl, untouched until they caved in on themselves. Inevitably, the rot crept in. I watched, stomach twisting, but never reached for them either. Golden mornings faded, leaving only the hush of a dim and empty kitchen. The scent of oranges was replaced by something bitter, something I didn’t have a name for. She was still the roots I had grown from, but now she twisted, strangling. And I—who had once been held so gently—became something shrinking, something withered.
And so I left—slowly, not in a single step, but in the quiet disintegration of belonging. I took what I could: the habit of peeling clementines in neat sections, the memory of her humming, the shape of her love before it changed.
The second home I knew smelled of fresh-tilled earth.
She grew things, too, but not the kind I had known. No fruit trees in her yard, no citrus scent on her hands. She planted vegetables—strong, practical things. Carrots yielded to her touch, torn from the soil with practiced hands. Her lips tasted of roasted squash and rosemary. Her touch was that of late summer corn and hands dusted with flour. With her, I became something more than I had been before. I was known, wholly and without question.
But some people are never meant to grow together.
It started with the smallest shifts—words unsaid, spaces widening between us like weeds creeping in. I ignored the way she never reached for the clementines I kept in the fruit bowl, the way she wrinkled her nose at their sharp scent. She preferred things that took time, things that could be preserved and stored away. I craved something immediate, something bright and bursting.
The cracks in our soil widened, slow and patient, until one night, they became an earthquake.
Love, I learned, is not always enough to keep something standing. The words between us grew heavier, thick with things unsaid. The house we built in each other began to splinter, cracks running through the foundation. I saw it in the way she turned away first, the way the space between us became a chasm neither of us could cross. The way her hands, once so sure on my skin, hesitated.
I left carrying the scent of turned earth on my clothes, the imprint of her touch on my bones.
The house I inhabit now is quiet.
It does not hum with the murmur of voices in the next room, the rustling of sheets, or the breath of someone sleeping beside me. It is silent in a way that presses against my ribs, in a way that makes my own breath feel too loud in the stillness. For a long time, I moved through it without really being in it. I do not cook. I do not plant. I let dishes pile in the sink, let the air go stale, let the bed remain unmade. There are no arms to pull me close, no steady presence to anchor me.
But the world does not wait for grief to subside.
Outside, the seasons shift. The trees, unconcerned with my sorrow, stretch their limbs toward the sky, their leaves unfurling in the hush of early spring. The days grow longer, spilling gold through my windows, laying warmth across the floorboards. The wind carries the scent of damp earth, of something stirring, something alive.
I do not stir. Not at first.
But one morning, without thinking, I buy a bag of clementines. I place them in the empty bowl, their brightness startling against the dark wood. Their scent seeps into the air, poisoning it with something sharp and sweet. Something familiar. I stand in the kitchen, staring at them, the weight of them too much and not enough all at once.
I do not touch them.
Days pass, and the sun stretches further into my home, into me. It fills the spaces I have left empty, pressing light into the cracks I have ignored. And something in me—small, quiet, half forgotten—reaches back.
I peel one open.
The skin splits beneath my fingers, releasing its citrus-sharp scent into the still air. Juice runs down my wrist, sticky and golden. I eat it in slow sections, the way I once had when love was something tangible, something shaped by hands other than my own. The taste is bright, tart, sun-warmed, and sweet.
The next day, I buy more fruit. I salt my tomatoes. I sweep the floor, run my hands over the rough grain of the table, let the light touch me where I have been untouched for so long. I do not fill the space with noise. I do not search for arms to hold me. Instead, I let the silence settle. I let the warmth spread. I let myself take up room.
And finally, I am home.
* * *
Katelynn Humbles is a writer whose work appears in Broken Antler Quarterly, Black Hare Press, Flash Fiction Magazine, Eunoia Review, Five on the Fifth, Welter, Literally Stories, Wingless Dreamer, and Tiny Molecules. In 2025, she was awarded the Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Raymond W. Ford Award in Poetry for “Emmaus Community Garden” and the Bennett Harris Humorous Writing Award for “Can Vending Machines be Nihilistic?” She is pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art, specializing in ceramics.
