Celia Bell

Celia Bell‘s work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and Bomb Magazine, among other venues. She holds an MFA from the New Writers Project and works as a bookseller in Austin, Texas.

Content by Celia Bell

Visual art of white capillaries floating in a blue substance

Fiction,

The Thing in the Garden

BY Celia Bell

Jodie’s body is a garden. After the cancer came they took off her breasts, and over the thick belt of scar, she tattooed Eden. Those gnarled green branches, that tongue-pink tropical flower, peaches so ripe and round you’d think you could squeeze them still. I held her hand in the tattoo shop, while the girl she’d worked with on the design bent over her body, holding the tattoo gun. She was a skinny girl, her head half shaved in the way the young kids are wearing it now.