Passing through our peanut butter and jelly kitchen, she’d shoot some words at me before grabbing her movie star sunglasses and hurrying off to someplace more glamorous. A petite woman, vodka lover with sleepy cat’s eyes and hip-switching walk, poured into high leather boots, forever waving goodbye over her shoulder.
Sarah Flick is retired from the US Forest Service and lives in Colorado. She has published in 101 Words, Flash Fiction Weekly, and a Modern Love column in the New York Times.
Julie Harrington’s mother made her into a living doll, blue eyes open, staring into space, hungry for invisible food, she never wet her diaper or cried: such a good baby, talking only when her string was pulled: I love you, let’s play, may I have a cookie, you hurt me.
Catherine Harnett is a poet and fiction author from Northern Virginia who has published three books of poetry and a number of short stories which appear in national and international magazines and anthologies. See more at catherineharnett.com.
She doesn’t believe in magic; it’s all deceit and illusion, like his promises. But when tiny fingers grasp hers, a mysterious force flows through her. What sorcery is this? she wonders. Two deep blue eyes gaze into hers. We don’t need him, they seem to say. You can do this.
Lesley also has short fiction published online at 101 Words, Paragraph Planet, and Wensum Lit, as well as a number of competition anthologies. She grew up in the North East and now lives in Hampshire.
Memories of a maternity ward should be happy.
Crying babies.
Proud fathers.
The counting of fingers and toes.
Exhausted, but exuberant, mothers.
Except for one.
There, in the corner.
The one facing the wall.
The one without a baby.
That was me.
Memories of a maternity ward should be happy.
Susan Gale Wickes is a writer from Indiana.
They severed your umbilical cord, rushing you from me, both holding our breaths until they intubated you. Days until I heard your feeble cry, weeks before I felt your gentle suckling, months before your artificial cords detached and I took you home. A whole year before I could finally exhale.
Nina Miller is an Indian-American physician, fencer, and creative. Her work can be found in Cutbow Quarterly, Bright Flash Literary Review, Five South, Roi Fainéant, Five Minutes and more. Find Nina on Twitter at @NinaMD1 or www.ninamillerwrites.com.
like strawberries and champagne
one seed toward ripeness,
bubble bursts into sparkling
like strawberries and champagne
the scent of you, sweetness
your touch, effervescence
for me, love at first fondness
for you, growing into it –
a pairing by chance
the birthing crystallizes
a mother and child
like strawberries and champagne.
Judith wrote this. She was overjoyed to celebrate Mother’s Day together with her daughter after two years of pandemic limitations.
Mom’s words from 70 years gone by, not even known to exist, but unearthed by her children in a casual document search. Tales told of youth and gaiety, champagne in the afternoon and dancing at night. Not our mom of laundry and grocery shopping, car pools and school bake sales.
Eileen draws on the emotions of real life and transforms them into micro bits of fiction.
Mom wears a tight smile now.
But give me Mama and fairy tales about overthrowing rich kings.
Mama, an open curtain, waltzing under moonlight after fights with Dad.
Mama, drowning fatherly fusillades with dirty jokes.
Not Mom who draws curtains, slinks through bills and empty rooms.
Mama.
A cracked word.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA program in fiction. His story, “Soon,” was nominated for a Pushcart. Yash’s work is forthcoming or has been published in WestWard Quarterly, Café Lit, and Ariel Chart, among others.
At night, her mother put her to bed by telling her stories of cotton candy clouds and a winged unicorn named Percival. She dreamed she was flying on Percival, occasionally trotting along various rainbows. Heaven couldn’t be that far away, she figured. She could sense her father waving to her.
Ran Walker is the author of 21 books, the most recent of which is CAN I KICK IT?: Sneaker Microfiction and Poetry. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
Ensconced in a wheelchair, my mother holds up her feet and wiggles them, showing off new pale beige moccasins, fur-lined, soft and roomy for her swollen feet. “My sister got them for me,” she tells a nursing home attendant, gleeful. But really it was me, her daughter, become unimaginably old.
Jacqueline Doyle’s flash chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press. Find her online at jacquelinedoyle.com and on Twitter at @doylejacq.