1910
Ida Smith lived on a large farm near the south shore of Lake Erie, a lake she believed was the ocean when she was very young, because the shore was sand and all she could see was water and water and she didn’t yet know the sea smelled like salt.
They hardly ever went to the lake at all, but the flat farmland of her home wasn’t so different from living on a body of water; you could still hear the loons and herons. In the summers, Ida and her three sisters neglected their chores and lay on towels by the apple orchard, pretending they were on a foreign shore, southern Italy, usually, like the vixens in the dirty novels they found on their mother’s bedside table, next to the nail scissors.
Ida Smith’s name wasn’t Ida Smith for long, but before she left and chose new names for herself, this was what she was called.
The Smiths’ farm was surrounded on all sides by other farms, and the other families kept to themselves, mostly, though it wasn’t unusual for one of the neighbors to come over, sit down at the kitchen table over pie and coffee with her father—though it was her mother who decided all matters, in the end—and discuss a possible sale of a parcel of land, a cow or a pig, a hay press. The only family with a child the sisters’ age were the Meiers, who had come from Germany not long before Ida was born. They shared the southeast line of the property, where her father was always planning to run a fence but never did.
The Meiers’ child, their only child, was named Theodor. Ida had known him her whole life—they were born in the same fall—and she never loved him as he loved her. It was irritating more than flattering, the way he stared at her, the way he followed her, the way he asked after her. Amelia was the one who loved Theodor—Amelia was the firstborn of the sisters, just one year older than Ida.
Theodor’s mother had died when he was six years old.
The funeral service for Theodor’s mother was one of Ida’s first memories. Rows of farmers dressed in black against the white church. The method of the death became an obsession, this woman who didn’t appear to be sick at all. One day she was alive—Ida saw her walking down the dirt road in a periwinkle dress—and the next day she was dead. What killed her? Ida asked her parents, and they told her it wasn’t a story for a young girl. They probably didn’t know themselves. Theodor was gone for a few weeks, after she died, to his aunt’s house in Cleveland; as soon as he returned, Ida walked to his house and asked him how she died.
“I killed her,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
Theodor’s father had told him the day before she died, when Theodor was throwing a fit about having to walk to church in the middle of a storm, You’re killing your mother!
Theodor often had bruises across his cheek in the precise shape of a palm. Ida’s father hit her, too, but only when she knew she deserved it, and he spared her his true strength. Still, she could tell it pained him to do it.
“You’re simple,” she said. “That’s not how it works.”
Though she wasn’t yet certain herself how death did and didn’t work, she knew that if a fit was all it took, her mother would’ve died long ago.
Theodor didn’t look at all comforted. His green, wide-set eyes looked from side to side, as if watching for listeners hidden in the orchard.
“She just fell on the floor,” he said. “I saw it myself. She looked strange and then she was just on the floor and she was dead.”
After his mother’s death, Theodor was always at the Smiths’ house. He never wanted to return to his father, a quiet man who did not know how to talk to children, especially his own son. His father butchered his own pigs and the Smiths ate them for dinner. A plate was set for Theodor every night, and he wasn’t given extra butter or meat with his meal—no guest portions, even though he was scrawny.
“How’s your family’s land doing?” were the only words Ida ever remembered his father saying. “Good? Good.”
Ida was well aware of Theodor’s love for her, they all were, and so she put him to use. He bought her candy, and makeup, and Cosmopolitan, and pencils and sketchbooks and pencil sharpeners for her drawings. She loved to draw, and she secretly believed she was very talented. She liked to use images from magazines as inspiration, or she drew images from outside: flowers and trees, dead baby birds that had fallen out of their nest by the well. She kept them in a neat pile under her bed and showed them to no one.
Sometimes she sent Theodor on an errand just to see if he’d do it. “Theodor, go to Lowden’s and pick me up some lipstick, will you? The reddest they have. And some cigarettes?”
She’d hand him money taken from the coffee tin in the potato cellar, the cash her parents thought they’d hidden well. It took him over an hour each way to walk to town, and he’d do it for her, even in the rain.
“Be a dear,” she’d say, and her sisters would laugh. Sometimes, to be kind, she kissed him on the cheek when he returned, and you could see all his blood rise to the place her lips had touched.
“You are really cruel, you know that?” Amelia said in the dark before bed in their shared room.
Amelia was more beautiful than Ida, and more favored by their parents. Ida thought this might have something to do with how Amelia’s right hand had been caught in a wringer when she was a toddler. Amelia hid her crookedness even from her sisters. The injury hadn’t made her bitter, in fact Amelia had always been fair to Ida—as fair as any sister could be—but Ida had no qualms about upsetting her. As soon as Amelia started to bleed, she made proclamations about pain, about suffering, acting as though she were a real woman now, not a child like Ida. She seemed irritated that Ida started to bleed herself just a few months later.
“He isn’t doing anything he doesn’t want to do,” said Ida, and Amelia couldn’t refute that.
Theodor was more pet than brother. He was smaller than her. She was very tall for a girl, and he was a little shorter than most, and the disparity between them only intensified as their bodies changed. Ida stretched taller and thinner and taller and thinner, and one day, Theodor’s face looked dirty with the sad start to a mustache. The facial hair was coarse, as if he’d descended very far from an animal, once wild, that had long ago lost its sharp claws and any hope of surviving on its own.
One day, she asked if she could kiss him. Not on the cheek.
“I need to practice,” she said.
They were both sixteen, and it was the height of summer. They were sweating already, though it was still morning, lying in the shade cast from the western side of the house until noon. Her mother was dyeing grass-stained linens with leftover coffee in the hope they’d be suitable for church; the boiling water had made the kitchen unbearably hot.
“Open your mouth,” said Ida. Theodor was being too sweet and too scared, and that wouldn’t prepare her for anything. “Our tongues are supposed to touch.”
“Caress” was the word her mother’s books liked to use. Her mother insisted all her daughters learn how to read, but the only books she ordered from the catalog were the dirty ones. The only other books in the house were a few dull children’s books, the Farmers’ Almanac, and the Bible.
They kissed. Theodor tasted nice and mild; she’d been fearing his breath would be like her father’s after he woke up in the morning and kissed her cheek at breakfast. That was the closest she’d ever been to another man’s mouth.
With her eyes open, she imagined Theodor as the grocer’s son, Archie, whose thick eyebrows bore down on her every time she walked into Lowden’s in a way that made her stand taller, shoulders back. Archie was nearly twenty and had been looking at Ida like this for some time; it was his gaze that made her realize her breasts were now actual, real breasts, not tender bumps that made her lie on her back at night. He was cute enough that she and Amelia felt compelled to buy their sanitary belts elsewhere. The last time Ida went in to Lowden’s, when he looked at her, her whole body felt it. She stared right back.
When she realized she was feeling that feeling in her whole body, not from Archie but from Theodor, she pulled away, stood quickly, and left him standing there, lips wet and eyes closed, and she ran inside.
It was different between them now, not because they’d kissed but because of what she’d felt when they kissed. This was part of the practice, then, she decided—it had to be. Not only could Theodor help teach her how to kiss and touch before there was someone real, but he could help her learn what she’d feel, too, and how to stay smart. Falling in love didn’t interest her because she didn’t believe in it. Her parents tolerated each other, most of the time, and she was lucky it wasn’t worse.
“You can’t really believe in true love,” Ida would say to Amelia, at night when they were supposed to be asleep. Amelia’s future, perfect husband she hadn’t yet met, as far as she knew, was as real to her as anyone. “That’s like believing in God.”
“I do believe in God,” Amelia said from her bed. “You should, too.”
Ida never understood Amelia’s piety, or her mother’s. None of their prayers ever came true.
“You don’t believe in anything,” said Amelia. “It’s really quite sad.”
“That’s not true,” Ida said, insulted. “I believe I will get out of here.”
“It’s not so terrible here. You know, it could be a lot worse.”
Ida thought about the children she’d seen in town, skinny, begging. They sat on the street and Ida didn’t know how to look at them when she passed; they were younger than her youngest sister. The ones who sang, with a hat upturned in their hand for coins, broke her heart the most.
“You’ve never left,” said Ida, as if she herself had. “It could be a lot better. You have no idea.”
When she imagined the world outside the farm, outside Ohio, she saw large cities, crowded with people from all over the world, cities she saw in magazines—new ideas, new languages, a million new ways to live a life. Here there was one life, and it bored her. At night, Ida drew city streets in her sketch pad, smudging the pencil with the meat of her thumb to make the gray of the buildings, the shadows of the walking strangers, drawing herself among them. She closed her eyes and imagined the great art she had not yet made—not these simple sketches, but paintings, large and busy with color and life—on display in a gallery with high ceilings, hung in gold frames, admired by all who passed them. Who’s the artist? people would ask. Ida Smith, others would answer. She told nobody of these fantasies, because they were foolish, especially for a girl, especially for a farm girl, but she let them bring her to sleep, and they colored her dreams.
Ida waited until her parents were asleep, a few nights after she’d kissed Theodor, to sneak out and go to his house. Nearly a mile walk through the knotty pasture ground was the fastest way, though in the dark she tripped over the route she knew well, fell and scuffed the heels of her hands half a dozen times. When she came to his house, the lone, dim light in the wide fields, she threw a clump of dry dirt at his window. The curtain opened and his face appeared. Looking dumb with confusion, he pressed his forehead to the glass, and she waved him to come down. He opened the window.
“Ida?” he asked in a whisper. “What are you doing? Is someone hurt?”
“You’re not going to let me in?”
He studied her face, and she stared back at him, trying to tell him why she was here without saying a word. He wasn’t getting it.
“Let me in,” she said.
“My father wakes up to anything,” he said, lowering his voice further.
“Come outside, then. Please.”
She gave him a softer look now, imploring him. Then he seemed to understand. He blushed and looked from side to side.
“Oh,” he said. His mouth seemed to be deciding whether to be excited or terrified. “One minute. Just give me one minute.”
He shut the window quietly and disappeared into the house. After a long minute, he came outside with an oil lamp, buttoning up a canvas shirt over his nightclothes. She’d never seen him in pajamas before, and they made him look strangely adult. When her father wore his pajamas, he looked like a little boy.
“It can’t be done outside,” he said, standing in front of her, looking uneasy. “It has to be in a bed.”
“We can try outside and do it in bed another time.”
It was a hot, humid night, and the rich smells of the pigs and the lake were strong.
“Okay,” he said, and set down the oil lamp, making sure it wasn’t going to fall over. He then took her shoulders, leading her a few steps back.
“Don’t move from the shadow,” he said gently.
It was the first time he’d ever told her what to do, and she didn’t mind it. He took his hands from her and they stood, staring at each other. She removed her nightdress, stepped toward him, took his hands, and placed them on her breasts. Was this the order of things, were these the proper steps? Her heart beat fast and she had to remember to breathe; she hadn’t expected that.
“Is this okay?” he asked, as if she hadn’t been the one to put his hands there. She just smiled. He was so gentle she hardly felt it, so she pressed harder on her own hand, covering his. He must feel her heart like that, pounding against his palm. The pressure of his hands on her breasts didn’t feel bad, but it didn’t feel good, either. It brought to mind the unwelcome image of her mother kneading bread. But his hands were cool, cooling her.
She pulled down his pants and moved her hand to him, and he let her touch him through his linens. “Ida,” he said, as if he were going to ask her to stop, but he didn’t. His sex changed as she touched it, which gave her a sense of power, but also fear, as if it’d become its own animal, no longer in Theodor’s control. It seemed impossible that he always carried this in his pants.
Theodor knew more about sex than Ida did, but not by much. He’d once told her his older cousins in Cleveland talked about it a lot, which she figured must be better than her mother’s books. Those books were fiction, fantasy. Women were always shivering with pleasure, overcome with desire. There was a lot of throbbing. Ida had never once felt that, though a few times she’d woken up to her hand between her legs, a rush of something waking her up, leaving her unsure of the dream. That wasn’t real, either. She needed to know what real people did to real people.
“Now what?” she asked.
“I put it in you,” he said. “I think.”
“How?”
“Lie down.”
She obeyed, the dry grass itchy along her spine and the earth hard under her head. Rocky soil, her father often complained. Don’t think about father. Archie, Archie, and then men after Archie. Some man who would get her out of this place. But it was Theodor she saw, holding himself on top of her, working himself into her with his hand. He kept looking at her, and she’d nod, she didn’t need him to stop. Her heart hadn’t slowed a bit. When he entered her, it hurt, but not terribly, and she tried not to be so tense and to keep her eyes open, but not on him. A beetle tickled her ear and she flicked it away.
Was it hurting him the same way it was hurting her? He closed his eyes—no, not in pain—he moved back and forth a few times, each movement a little easier for her to take, and then he suddenly stopped and went still.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He left her body, pulled up his pants, and sat next to her. She stayed lying down, watching the lightning bugs against the stars.
“So it’s like that for a little while,” he said. “But in a bed.”
Ida didn’t kiss Theodor the whole time, and he didn’t kiss her, either. Maybe they should’ve, she thought, maybe they should now? He wasn’t looking at her as if he wanted to kiss her. He wasn’t looking at her at all. He was staring into the night as if he’d just seen a wraith in the pasture. There was a tale about such a creature, a tale told by older children to scare younger children, a ghost of a murdered farm girl, her throat slit open. The adults let the tale be told; though it gave the children nightmares, it kept them inside when the land went dark. Half the adults probably still believed in her themselves.
“I’ll see you,” she said, standing and dressing quickly. There was no need to have taken off her whole dress. It was filthy now, gritty with dirt.
“Okay.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“Can I walk you back?”
“I’ll be all right.”
The kitchen windows were light from the lanterns when she returned. She knew what awaited her, and she walked to the door anyway. There was nowhere else to go. Her father opened the door as she approached the porch, his tall, lean frame blocking her entry.
“Tell me,” he said, furious, but with relief on his face, too, seeing that she was all right. “Tell me where you were. You tell me now!”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I went on a walk.”
He took her by the wrist and pulled her inside, shutting the door behind them. Amelia was there, too, and her mother, watching. Surely the little sisters were somewhere watching, too, peeking out from the doorframe, holding their breath.
In the kitchen light, she must’ve been a sight. Her dress was brown, the hem soaked with mud. She could only imagine the state of her hair. Perhaps there was a way to tell what she’d just done; if there was, her mother would be the first to see it.
“I didn’t know where you were,” said her mother, who looked older than she ever had before, her low breasts showing underneath her nightgown, her eyes shadowed. “Do you know what it’s like, to wake up and not have your child in your home?”
“I’m all right,” said Ida, waiting for her father to hit her, but he kept his hands to his sides. “I was just on a walk. That’s all. I swear.”
“Of course you don’t know,” said her mother. “You think you know everything, but you don’t.”
Her father told her, tired more than angry now, that she was in charge of doing the washing for the next week. One word of complaint, two weeks.
“Yes, Papa.”
“No helping her,” he said to Amelia.
“Yes,” said Amelia.
Ida’s insides were already sore, and her hips remembered the hard ground. Even so, a warm feeling inside her gut did not die, even as her father scolded her further and her mother soured. She thought about Theodor’s face, his closed eyes, the pure pleasure and shock in his kind face, how it made her want to pull him closer, to feel his heartbeat against hers.
As soon as the girls were back in their room, Ida slapped Amelia. “Why would you do a thing like that? What have I ever done to you?”
Amelia clutched her cheek but didn’t cry.
“I was worried about you, you fool. I thought you might have been taken! I didn’t tell them anything. I was just looking for you and Mama woke up.”
Ida sat on the bed. She took off her dirty shoes and socks. A leaf fell from her hair. Something sticky and wet was between her legs.
“Where were you?” Amelia asked, more curious than angry. She still believed in the ghost of the farmgirl.
“I was helping Theodor with something.”
Amelia shook her head.
“If you tell anyone,” threatened Ida, “I will cut your hair off in your sleep.”
“I promise I won’t.”
Ida lay down and put her hands over her breasts, the way Theodor had, feeling her breath. Amelia kept promises.
“Be careful,” Amelia said, after she blew out the lantern. Ida pretended to be asleep, though she wouldn’t sleep at all that night. “I don’t like this, Ida. I really don’t like it at all.”
After spending all day washing the linens, Ida again went out to be with Theodor. And the next night, and the next, and most nights after that, until the weather became too cold, the dirt felt like ice, and her feet were numb by the time she came back home. In time, she allowed herself to kiss him. He took longer and longer to finish. He found her with his hand, making her feel what she’d felt in those dreams. She thought the tide of it would drown her, but she’d find her breath, and laugh, and kiss him again. They lay together, after, in the dark, and he told her more about his father, how he worried for him, his grief, his drinking. He told Ida how he missed his mother every day, every hour. He’d wake up, sometimes, forgetting she was dead, and then he’d remember.
She drew a portrait of him, one night, from memory, and she brought it to him, the first drawing she ever gave to anyone. He smiled, examining it. He kept saying, “You did this?”
“It’s so good,” he said. “But I’d rather have one of you, not me.”
Ida accepted the assignment, and over the next several nights, she drew her own portrait, the hardest drawing she’d ever done. She drew draft after draft, never feeling like she captured herself right, the wave of her hair, the curve of her brow, using the reflection in the washroom. At last, one satisfied her, and she gave it to him, with reluctance and pride.
“I love it,” he said. “I’ll keep it hidden.”
The kitchen was always dark when Ida came back home. If Amelia woke up again and found Ida’s bed empty, she didn’t say a word.
© Anna Hogeland, 2026. From Wild Aster, by Anna Hogeland, to be published by Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. on December 1, 2026.
Anna Hogeland is the author of the novels The Long Answer and Wild Aster. She has an MFA from UC Irvine. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Big Issue, iNews, The Gloss Magazine, Romper, The Southern Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in Western Massachusetts.
