Once a month, my mother got religion. It came on her in the night hard, a sheet-soaking fever. Sunday morning, I’d find her in the bathroom spackling the seams and chips in her forehead before painting an alien face over her own.

Like God wouldn’t recognize her Friday night self.

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and the anthology New Microfiction (WW Norton, 20180). Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006.