The Pale Flesh of Wood
By Elizabeth A. Tucker
Excerpt from Chapter Nine: Sunday Night Movies—1957-1962
One Sunday night, Lyla and her mother start a new tradition. They stay home and watch old home movies projected on the living room wall—reels of silent 8mm footage that didn’t seem
to add up to much of anything when Lyla’s parents filmed them. But now, these movies seem to be all they have left. Watching their former selves in black and white will be a ritual that will last for many years— until one day they stop.
Side by side, Lyla and her mother sit on the carpet with their backs against the couch. They hold hands underneath the woolen blanket draped over their legs. Lyla’s mother reminds her of how her father accidentally brought the blanket home after an anniversary trip to Big Sur, the very trip that brought them Baby Daniel. Over the next few years, they all learned to love this blanket as though it were part of the family, like a pet. Because it still smells of her father’s Old Spice aftershave, Lyla forbids her mother to put it in the laundry machine for fear her father’s scent will be washed away. Lyla is not ready for that yet. She is ten years old and has only just thrown grainy bits of him over the side of the boat.
This first night, her mother unpacks the projector and sets it up on the coffee table.
Lyla holds her breath and begins counting, One Mississippi, two Mississippi, like when they’d drive through the rainbow tunnel coming home from San Francisco. Counting Mississippis, Lyla prepares herself to see her father again.
Lyla’s mother fiddles with the projector, but she is taking forever. At twenty-eight Mississippis, Lyla’s face turns red. Her lungs want to explode.
“Hurry up!” Lyla manages to squeak out, then steals a sip of air and continues counting. Twenty-nine, thirty.
“I’m trying, honey. You have to be patient.”
But patience, Lyla begins to believe, might send her to the grave. She sneaks another breath.
Lyla’s mother removes the first movie, July 1946, from its aluminum canister and lines the sprocket holes of the film onto the teeth of the projector. Lyla’s father had not taught them how to do this. There are many things he failed to tell them before he left. But this, threading the film projector, wasn’t even on the radar.
“Do you even know what you’re doing?” Lyla gives up holding her breath. She doesn’t mean to hurt her mother’s feelings, but Lyla has never seen her do anything remotely handy. That was Daddy’s job.
“Oh, give me a break, Miss Debbie Doubter. How hard can it be?” Her mother flips the metal switch to the on position, but she’s forgotten one important step. She’s failed to lower the roller arm to secure the filmstrip in place. The movie immediately bunches up onto itself and jams the machine.
“See!” A weight starts building in Lyla’s chest again.
Her mother snaps the projector off and tries to unravel the mess, but it’s useless. The filmstrip has jumbled into a giant knot. She leans over and tears at the film with her teeth. Her mother looks like an animal when she does this, like the tiger at the San Francisco Zoo at feeding time. The filmstrip tears free, and Lyla’s mother peels the tail out of the machine. She holds the tangled ball in her hands, then tries to balance it on her nose, clapping her hands and barking like a seal. The filmstrip ball falls to the floor.
“What are you doing?” Lyla asks.
“I was just trying to have a little fun. Geez, Louise. Get it? Geez, Louise.” Her mother snorts with laughter, pointing to herself. She takes a sip from her wine glass, still giggling.
Lyla rolls her eyes, and her mother rolls her eyes back, before getting up. “Well, here’s looking at you, kid,” she says, as she chucks that portion of their lives into the wastebasket.
Watching this, Lyla makes a promise to herself. She will sneak into the living room after her mother goes to bed and retrieve the discarded film, swearing she will be the one to tape their lives back together. She will hide the gnarled filmstrip in the shoebox underneath her bed, along with a host of other things that remind her of her father—his old dog tags, a signed baseball from when the Giants moved to San Francisco, the old fish fossil he guilted her into keeping on that drive to the beach when they almost crashed, the American kestrel feather she had taped to the back of the obsidian arrowhead, a collection of newspaper clippings about his days on the high school basketball team.
His return from the war.
His obituary.
Louise pulls the instruction manual out of the projector box and reads the directions, cover to cover, before she attempts to thread the machine again. It takes hours, a whole bottle of wine later. But this time, when she lowers the roller arm and flicks the switch, the movie starts at its new beginning.
“See, Lyla!” Her mother is giddy with her small triumph. “Have a little faith, will you,” she jokes, as though Lyla should have never questioned her know-how.
I do have faith, Lyla almost protests but doesn’t, because right then her father pops onto the living room wall.
“Daddy!” Lyla screams. “Look, Mama. There he is!” Lyla waves to her father.
“Yes, sweetheart. There he is!” Lyla’s mother holds her hand to her mouth.
On film, Lyla’s father is sitting on the edge of the bed with his camera turned toward himself. His smile is wide and bright. He talks to the camera, but because it is a silent movie, Lyla can only guess what he says. She is certain he is telling her he loves her because of the happy wetness in his eyes. He then blows a kiss to the camera as though he somehow knew they’d be watching this movie without him one day.
Together, Lyla and her mother sit on the living room floor and watch the footage wobble as he turns the camera back around and focuses the lens on baby Lyla, who is asleep on her mother’s chest.
“Look, and there’s baby me!” Lyla squeals.
“It is. You in all your glory, miracle girl.” Under the blanket, Louise squeezes Lyla’s kneecap. Lyla likes it when her mother reminds her that she’s a miracle, how her birth defied all odds, especially with that sneaky umbilical cord wrapped around her neck like a python.
“I was so small,” Lyla says.
“Yes, sweetheart, you were. Your tiny head used to fit right in Daddy’s palm like a grapefruit.” Her mother holds out her hand, palm up, showing how he’d cup Lyla’s infant head.
“You weighed almost nothing. Just a little bird sitting in a nest. And now look at you!”
Lyla is mesmerized by watching her baby self—every yawn, every blink of the eye, each bubble of spit that escapes her new-born lips. Frame by frame, nothing more seems to unfold than Lyla’s silent breathing. But she’s utterly captivated. On film, Lyla’s eyelids flutter like the wings of a hummingbird, resisting sleep, something she does for the rest of her life. Like her mother, Lyla will never be a good sleeper.
Clip after clip, baby Lyla grows before their very eyes; her nose rounds, her cheeks start to fill out in a sort of time-lapse photography.
“My goodness.” Her mother sighs. “It’s hard to believe you’re the same girl.” She reaches back under the blanket and pulls Lyla’s hand out, measuring their hands. “It won’t be long until yours are bigger than mine.”
Lyla doubts this. The tips of her fingers only reach her mother’s first knuckle.
“My hands will never be like yours, Mama,” Lyla says. Her eyes remain dead ahead on the living room wall. “They’re just stupid piggy stubs.”
Her mother doesn’t disavow Lyla of her mistaken belief. She doesn’t remind Lyla she possesses half of the Hawkinses’ genes—a family of giants—so she has no choice but to tower over her one day. Instead, her mother tucks Lyla’s hand back under the blanket and squeezes it between the knobs of her knees. It hurts when she does this, but Lyla can’t pull it away. Her mother’s grip is too tight.
Teased by the image of her father cast upon the living room wall, Lyla tries with all her might to remember how it used to be back when he was still alive. It’s not hard; he’s only been gone for six months.
Her chest tightens. For a hot second, she feels like she might need to get up and run to her bedroom.
But she doesn’t.
She can’t move.
She is paralyzed by all she sees.
And all that she will never see again.
Lyla closes her eyes and pretends—even if just for a moment— her father is not gone; he is still here, quietly standing in the corner, mixing a drink at the bar and watching his girls watch one of his movies.
But when Lyla opens her eyes and turns to the corner of the room, her father is not there. He is not mixing a drink and running commentary on their lives. He is now just a two-dimensional ghost caught on film.
“Daddy?” This is all Lyla manages to ask. She doesn’t yet question why he did what he did. That will all come much later.
Next to Lyla, her mother draws in a long, deep breath through her nose and exhales slowly out of her mouth, as though Dr. Ramsey is holding a stethoscope to her back. Her eyes are squeezed shut. Lyla’s mother is not crying, but she’s stopped watching the movie. Lyla pinches her eyelids shut again too, wanting to see what her mother sees behind closed eyes. In the darkness, Lyla hears the thrum of the film as it rolls through a small part of their lives.
In the darkness, she listens to the gallop of her heartbeat. And then, just like that, the film is swallowed up and spat out onto the take-up reel.
“Oh, Lyla.” Her mother throws off the blanket and gets up. “I don’t think I can ever do that again.”
But she does.
Months later, Lyla’s mother hauls the projector back down from the attic with a second film canister tucked under her chin. February 1947. Lyla doesn’t know why her mother changed her mind, but she is glad she did. She misses her father something terrible, and Lyla guesses her mother does too.
Copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth A. Tucker
A Novel
For fans of Celeste Ng and Dani Shapiro, this lyrical debut set in twentieth-century Northern California offers a multigenerational braided narrative examining the rippling effects of trauma and perceived fault after a loved one’s suicide.
1953. WWII veteran Charles Hawkins sweet-talks his daughter, Lyla, into climbing the family’s oak tree and hanging the rope for their tire swing. Eager, Lyla crawls along the branch and ties off a bowline, following her father’s careful instructions, becoming elated when he playfully tests the rope and declares the knot to be “strong enough to hold the weight of a grown man. Easy.”
But when her father walks out back one November night and hangs himself from the rope, Lyla becomes haunted by the belief that his death is her fault, a torment amplified by her grief-stricken mother, who sneaks up to the attic and finds comfort in the arms of her dead husband’s sweaters, and a formidable grandmother, who seemingly punishes Lyla by locking her outside, leaving her to stare down the enormous tree rooted at the epicenter of her family’s loss.
Set among the fault-prone landscape of Northern California, The Pale Flesh of Wood is told by three generations of the Hawkins family. Each narrative explores the effects of trauma after the ground shifts beneath their feet and how they must come to terms with their own sense of guilt in order to forgive and carry on.
Historical | Women's Fiction Family Life [She Writes Press, On Sale: February 11, 2025, Paperback / e-Book , ISBN: 9781647428341 / eISBN: 9781647428358]
Elizabeth A. Tucker is a fiction writer, poet, playwright, and sixth-generation Californian. Her work can be found in a host of literary journals, including Transfer Magazine, Red River Review, Aroostook Review, Ponder Review, The Bangalore Review, SNReview, and JuxtaProse Magazine. She is a two-time finalist for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers, a finalist for the 2020 Craft Elements Fiction Contest, and a finalist for the 2020 Barry Lopez Prize in nonfiction. She lives and writes at 6,600 feet above sea level in the Sierra Nevada with her husband and two children.
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