Limes

Trinity University English professor Andrew Porter, MFA, published The Disappeared with Penguin Random House in 2023. The collection of stories is the latest from the author of the story collection The Theory of Light and Matter and the novel In Between Days.

A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Porter has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, The Threepenny Review, and Ploughshares, and on public radio's Selected Shorts. He currently teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity.

This excerpt from The Disappeared is titled "Limes".

"I remember the first housewarming gift we received was a Mexican lime tree. It was given to us by our friend Lorena, who is a sculptor of some local renown, and it was delivered to us in a gorgeous ceramic pot that Lorena herself had made. This thing will live forever, she'd said to us the night she'd dropped it off. And she was right. That Mexican lime tree proved to be the most resilient of all of the plants and trees on our back deck, the only one to make it through that first frosty winter in San Antonio. By spring, we were using those limes to garnish our margaritas, and by summer Lorena was married again, her fifth husband and, she hoped, her last. I love and I love and I love being in love, she often said, and I even like getting married. But somehow I just don't seem to like being married. But that fifth one would stick, and for years afterward I would make a connection between that marriage and our lime tree. I'm not really sure why. I'm not a superstitious person, but I was about that tree. Winter after winter, I would water it and protect its leaves with burlap tarps. Somehow it seemed the most important thing in the world."

The leaves of the lime tree in the background of the image were generated using Adobe Illustrator.