Mother
Apple Tree
JULIA MOTYKA
Word Count 1460
The cat dug up the tree again. I’m not sure whether she’s trying to eat it or kill it. Its tiny leaves are punctured where her teeth have tried to pull them off. They look like green swiss cheese. It’s a very small tree; just a seedling. My mother planted it. Last winter she and my daughter shared a day together and shared an apple and my mother, in an uncustomarily sentimental move, pocketed the core and planted three seeds. One died. Two grew. She kept one and gave me the other.
“Mama,” this same child—four years old— says in the middle of her bath while playing with a small plastic sailboat, “I will miss you when you die.” She says this apropos of nothing. “I will miss you, too,” I say simply, and smile at her, “but I will always be with you in your heart.” “Yes,” she says, “and you will go back to the earth.” “Yes,” I say. There is a long pause while she slowly pours the water out of the tiny sailboat. “Now it can float again.” “Yes, bug,” I say. “Now it can float.”
The Fortune of All Womankind
ANN POWERS
Word Count 1435
It is not quite dusk, not quite winter. The highway, sky, trees, even the occasional other car, all shades of gray. I am perhaps 25. Mother, perhaps 50. There is a quiet ease between us, the hum of the car the only sound. Then my mother runs her hands through her hair and says, “Did you know I was pregnant again after Sue?”
I re-grip the steering wheel and glance at her. She is staring straight ahead, out the window, decidedly not looking at me. Her profile is sharp against the dusky sky. Her hair has been short for several years now, but I still feel a little jolt when I don't see the classic French twist she wore throughout my childhood and my college days, the style she abandoned after my father died, after she sold the land they had purchased with her small inheritance: the sixty acres, the house, the pond, the two horses, the tractor. All gone.
Disco Lullaby
SAARA DUTTON
Word Count 871
For anyone who was a child in the strange, sleazy, messed-up decade of the 1970s, the unmistakable flavor of sugar cereal in milk is guaranteed to bring my generation back to our Saturday morning pajama-clad days, sitting on the shag carpet in front of the TV. Eating cereal and giggling at Laff Olympics and Scooby Doo, Saturday morning was ours alone. We made the cereal, we set the rules. Parents were usually in the next room, sleeping off hangovers on their waterbeds and “just trying to get their shit together.” The emphasis was on trying. It didn’t seem to us that any adults actually succeeded in getting their shit together back then. That wasn’t the point. Everyone was on a journey, but no one arrived anywhere.