My mother died of a massive stroke, but she swears she didn’t. Dropped down dead right there at the breakfast buffet, then climbed back up to her feet—pardon me, she said to the coveralled man behind her—and went on ladling gravy over her biscuits. 

It seemed kind of presumptuous to no-thank-you dying, bald-faced rude like a lingering party guest. After all, sometimes folks dying at the all-you-can-eat is just supposed to be the natural order of things, and—between you and me—the secret best thing about mamas is that they’re temporary. 

By the time we had driven her home from Fancy Rick’s Breakfast Rodeo, her limbs had locked up into a rigor mortis so profound we sat her in the La-Z-Boy and for three days her eyes slid around in their sockets, tracking our comings and goings but never blinking.

Death is like this, though: first soft, then hard, then soft again, but different—mealy, mushy, like the slow rot of a stone fruit, the innards swelling and skin sloughing off and the flesh-fat yellow then brown then black underneath. A more apt description, in fact, I can’t seem to finger than an overripe plum: a bruise where a woman used to be.

You’re dead, Carol-Ann, says her cardiologist—who she swore was a hack, who she once accused of pumping her full of forever-chemicals to keep her just sickly enough to keep needing him but not enough to die—but she turns her chin up at him and gathers her pocketbook up under her elbow. He presses his stethoscope to her chest and waves me over to listen; the stillness between the lobes of her ribs is stark and stunning, a soundproofed room wallpapered in egg-crate foam, and it’s beautiful and horrible both. On the drive home she snuffles out a series of short gasps I take for crying; later, she pores over the Yellow Pages, points a dagger-finger at a few promising options, and despite myself I promise I’ll call and schedule a consult—not a single cardiologist in the county, I’ll report back after, is accepting new patients.

Bobby-Dale’s new girlfriend says it’s kind of romantic, isn’t it, how much she must’ve loved living, hanging on so tight. Heroic, even. Rage against the dying light, and all that.

And Mama, limp-flopping like a Raggedy Ann behind the cordless vacuum says in her parched voice, sandpaper rubbing together, Why thank you, CiCi, how nice of someone to notice, even though just last night she’d rasped that CiCi was a pointless sack of fluids and phlegm with not a thought bobbing around in all that sinew to spare, and I thought she’d sounded just a little jealous.

I consider telling CiCi that it’s actually a haughty refusal to be caught out that courses like sap through the veins that used to ferry blood and lymph across her cells, a kind of stubbornness that stretches deep into the clay like pipsissewa, but instead I chew the inside of my cheek to a pulp; the balance of things is delicate, after all.

Ronda my therapist says, Have you considered she’s gaslighting you? And I sigh and nod but then shrug because of course I have but also what am I going to do? She’s obviously dead but also won’t die and so I get my parking validated by the little Portuguese woman at the front desk and Mama’s waiting in the passenger seat when I climb behind the wheel, dust and ash pooling on my leather seats underneath her naked pelvis, sharp and moon-white in the sun. I almost sneer to At least tidy up after yourself, why don’t you? but instead I pretend I don’t see; instead I say nothing and she says nothing and when we get home I Amazon Prime a dustbuster to keep in the glovebox because this is the sort of thing family does for its own, isn’t it?

For Christmas, I work back-to-backs at the Down-N-Out and take out a personal loan with 33% interest to buy her the Rolls-Royce of caskets, a shiny lacquered thing with pink satin lining and polished brass hardware and a concave pillow to cup her skull: a real swanky place to spend eternity, and cost as much as a mortgage too, which I guess it kind of is. After dinner she lugs it out to the burn pile, price tag still swinging from the handle, and douses it in kerosene, and for a split second I think how easy it would be to tip her over into the bonfire, too, her beef jerky limbs catching like kindling.

Bobby-Dale and Tammy-Rae and me, once enough is enough, sweet-talk Mama into a meeting with Father Johnson at First Harvest, to get his opinion on what it is Jesus and Mary and the whole subcommittee might think about all this, and it’s easy enough getting her there, rubber waders billowing around her waist to keep her soggy snail-trail of putrid something-or-other from soaking the wall-to-wall in God’s living room. For a while she’d been convinced they’d call her a saint, call the Pope, and her face falls when after some discussion the priests decide that she is an abomination and not a miracle. Father Johnson says it’s a sin against God, her refusing to die, but that just makes her dig her heels in all the harder. She spits a dusty wad of coppery scab at their robe-hems and says she’d rather be an abomination than a Catholic anyway, with that attitude and when we sweep her toward the door she shouts over her shoulder that it turns out there’s no God or heaven or point anyway, and sneers wickedly when they hurry off because she knows they know that there’s no one knows better than her.

Bobby-Dale takes Mama up to the house—There there, now, Mama, can’t everybody stomach these things is all, like field dressin’ a deer, or the Yankees—and Tammy-Rae and I idle out at the curb and suck down a pack of Marlboros, one at a time. Tammy-Rae wagers this whole business is all on account of Mama’s Taurus sun, Taurus moon, Taurus rising. Trip-Tauruses, that’s about as Taurus as you can get, according to her. I don’t know much about astrology save for what I read in the weekly, but I’ve been driving this Ford Taurus for fourteen years and can’t get the tranny to shift into second to save my life. I figure Mama with stubbornness etched into her bones by the universe itself is like that too: can’t shift. 

You’re just like her, y’know, Tammy-Rae says, dustbuster in one hand, cigarette in the other, and I scoff that I was born in June.

No. Long-suffering, I mean. Joan of Arc-type shit. She flicks her ashes onto the floorboard, then vacuums them up.

Leave it, is what I say, this time.

Danielle Barr is a full time stay-at-home mom and sometime-writer. She was the winner of the Driftwood Press annual short story contest, and her works have appeared in The Milk House, The Hooghly Review, Querencia Press, and others. She is currently querying her debut novel. Danielle lives in rural Appalachia with her husband and four young children, and can be found on Instagram @daniellebarrwrites, Twitter @dbarrwrites, and Bluesky @daniellebarrwrites.bsky.social.

It was a strange time for us all. 

My mother, always a confident woman, acted odd her whole pregnancy. Was nervous from noon to night. My father, a nonstop talker, was silent. And I had what they called “sympathy symptoms.”

When she threw up, I threw up. When she gained weight, I gained weight. When her period stopped, my period stopped. I’d only just gotten it a couple months before. 

We craved the same things. We were repelled by the same things. We refused to touch apples. A whiff of one sent us running to the toilet.

I could feel everything she could in her body. I even knew when it was her time before she did.

When the contractions came, I heard her screams a half second behind my own. I felt the drugs they gave her. I was high in the sky. Like I’d climbed a tree that reached into the clouds. I was watching myself as I lay on the ground. 

I was ripped open when I heard my mother scream. 

What seemed like years later, I woke up. I told my mother if this is what I feel, I couldn’t imagine what she was feeling. She told me not to imagine it at all.

I studied the red, wriggling creature in my mother’s arms. During her whole pregnancy, I never heard my mother or father discuss names. Any name they picked would change the way I looked at the baby. Maybe even how I felt towards him. 

That’s when I asked my parents if I could name my brother. 

They looked at each other in alarm, then at me. Like I was a stray dog that might bite them any second if they made the wrong move. It was no stranger than they acted the whole of that year, so I waited until my mother, then father, gave a small nod.

I wanted him to have a name that marked the beginning of his story, so I asked my mother when she first suspected she was pregnant. She cried, which wasn’t weird after giving birth. But it was weird that my father cried too, cried even harder. 

She spoke more slowly than I’d ever heard in my life, asked if I remembered the day I fell from the top of the apple tree. She said don’t try to remember if I didn’t, but I did. That day we’d learned about Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion in school. Important men in history books seemed to have their big ideas alone, so when the school bus dropped me off, before my parents came home, I climbed the tallest tree I could find in the orchard behind our house.

I could never do this when they were home. They never allowed me to go into the old man’s orchard alone, even though he’d encouraged me to come and play in the trees whenever I wanted. Especially if I was bored and alone. 

I sat on the highest branch I could find that day and turned my face to the sun. It worked for sunflowers. I closed my eyes, let the sunshine filter through the tiny veins in my eyelids, and imagined a great red ocean whose depths held kingdoms of new animals to discover. 

An idea was swimming into view, but then a tidal wave came up from the trunk of the tree and shook me loose. As I fell, I dreamed that I not only hit the ground, but sank down into it. The soil folded over me. Sealing me in. 

My mother woke me up with her screaming, held my head in her lap. My father brushed hair and leaves from my face. I touched a hand to my sore abdomen and wondered if I had fallen on my stomach. My father lifted me in his arms and blood ran down my legs.

My body didn’t feel like home after that.

The doctor wrapped my sprained wrist and bandaged my cuts. She took my parents to another room while I was left to my own thoughts on the exam table. 

The only thought I had was that I never got my big important idea. The kind of idea that got its own name—a law of motion, a theory of relativity, a principle of pain, an idea whose name began to answer the question it inspired.

The baby cried. Such a strange sound that made my chest hurt and prickle with sweat. I gazed out of the hospital window into the sun, peering again into my great red ocean. 

I said the first name that fell into my mind. 

We moved after Gravity was born. I’m still trying to have a big idea, but I can’t have them in the orchard anymore. My parents said they’d never liked the old man. It’s time for some space, they said. 

And we had space. From him, from the trees, but also, the natural divide between my mother’s body and my own returned. I felt what I felt now. She felt what she felt. 

I was lonely for a long time.

I didn’t mind the move. There are trees all over the world. Gravity too. Wherever my body goes, there my thoughts go as well, even if there is still an ocean between them.

Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep, and want so badly to talk to someone—but to who, and about what, I don’t know—I close my eyes and hold a flashlight over them. 

I see my great red ocean and imagine myself slipping into the pull of an underwater current. There is still so much to discover there. Divine creatures and monsters alike. I don’t know where it will take me. 

Maybe it’s not a place, but somewhere in time. Sometimes the past pulls at me like seaweed gripping around my ankle, dragging me into a rift in the ocean floor. And if I just look down, look at the face of the sea creature holding me, then some great idea will be illuminated. Maybe.

I turn off the flashlight and open my eyes to my dark bedroom. The present wraps me in a thick blanket of sleep and I am gone. 

The move has been good to us. Instead of an orchard, we have a lake. Weekends I swim and draw every plant and animal I can find. On this new side of the world, my mother smiles, my father talks, my brother is a wonder.

My body is starting to feel like home again.

The baby is walking and climbing and falling down on his own now. Most people call him Gray. But I’ll always call him by the name I gave him. A beginning as strong as the laws of nature. Somewhere to start and somewhere to end all at once.

M.M. Kaufman is a writer based in Georgia. She is a Fulbright Scholar and earned an MFA in the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. She is currently the Managing Editor at Rejection Letters and team member for Micro Podcast. Her fiction is published with The Normal School, Hobart, Metonym Journal, Sundog Lit, Daily Drunk Mag, (mac)ro(mic), HAD, Olney Magazine, Pine Hills Review, Maudlin House, jmww, Major 7th Magazine, Rejection Letters, JAKE, Icebreakers Lit, and Identity Theory. Read more on mmkaufman.com. Find her on Twitter @mm_kaufman, Blue Sky @mmkaufman.bsky.social, Instagram @mmkaufman, or at the carwash.

We watched the movie in Julie’s basement. Back when she had a mansion. Back before her parents got divorced. The plot was convoluted. The runtime was excessive. They’d filmed it like 20 minutes away in La Crosse, and we recognized about a million Wisconsin landmarks, or I did anyway. I was sitting three feet from the screen. Julie fell asleep on Keith’s lap, and I could hear occasional rustling behind me, Keith moving softly, Keith trying not to make things weird. In the movie, there’s like some kind of minorly mutated flu virus, and a bunch of old people refuse a vaccine. What happens is they die. They die, and they do so in enough numbers to constitute like twelve percent of the difference in a real close presidential election that swings to the Democrat, and there are media stories. Academic studies. Outsiders flood this town, and a bunch of kids like us get together and use rose petals to write “STAY STRONG” in front of every single former home of a now dead voter. The roses look all bloody on top of the snow. It’s hard to tell if the movie switches to black and white or if everything’s just so grey that it’s all indistinguishable. I caught Keith in the glare. He was scrunched way to the side of the sofa, Julie snoring away with her hair rolling over his legs.

“I figured you were having some kind of boner situation,” I said, on the way home.

“I was trying to like move her head real gentle on account of I didn’t want her to wake up. It wasn’t supposed to be creepy at all. And then like two clumps of her hair came out in my hand, and I kept daydreaming she had cancer.”

“Fuck,” I said, looking at him. Not wanting it to be true. But also imagining if it were. Watching Keith do the same.

“I’m not good with sickness,” he said, and I told him how the thing about cancer was that people who had it didn’t want to think about it, and you could do a lot by mostly ignoring it. Mostly waiting, which was all we could do. We waited for Julie to show up bald or dead, but the closest we got were wigs. I liked the blonde one. Platinum with bangs and cut tight shoulder-length. Keith was into the same style, only he preferred it jet black. Nobody else seemed to have an opinion. Julie’d walk by, and the hall would kind of tense up, and Keith would give her his math homework. Statistics, it was. I didn’t have much to offer until Julie started sleeping at her mom’s new place. Maxine’s. It was a lot smaller. Two blocks from the high school. We got invited over more often. We invited ourselves. Julie laughed louder. The movies got lighter. We tried to play games. Sometimes, Keith had an early curfew, and before he left, he’d look at me, kind of ambivalent, kind of asking.

“Gonna catch a ride with someone else,” I’d say, and he’d nod and shut the front door real quiet. One time I stayed until 2AM, and we watched music videos while Julie played with her bangs. We talked about the bands you play when no one’s awake to hear and she told me not to tell Keith how late I stayed, “Not because anything happened, but he’s probably not ready to hear it.”

“Okay,” I said, and I never told Keith. Even though I wanted to. Too scared he’d see right through me. 

Julie lost weight, then she put it back on. We didn’t know if she was getting better. Time was passing. It was senior year. Winter. Some weekends she’d spend at her dad’s place, and Keith and I would drive by. Julie drove this yellow Jeep, and sometimes it would be parked there. Sometimes not. Sometimes there was music. Sometimes not. On one of the quiet nights, Keith kept driving in circles. We couldn’t see the Jeep.

“Didn’t you say she’d be here?” said Keith.

I shrugged. “I don’t remember what I said.”

Keith pulled over. The mansion was behind us, built into a bluff. Somewhere below was the river. We couldn’t see it in the dark. “Listen,” he said, “If you want me to, like, stop, you just need to say so, okay?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. I looked at the house and thought about movies and basements and the way people fall asleep.

“Like.” Keith drummed on the dash. “I’m just trying to make her feel better, I guess, is what I’m saying. If it makes you feel weird or whatever. That’s all.”

“I don’t feel weird,” I said.

He nodded a little. I nodded back. He put the car in drive, and we wheeled around town for a while. Stopped at the Hy-Vee. Keith grabbed some roses, and I did too, and we found the Jeep parked outside Maxine’s. The lights inside the house were on. Julie was talking to her mom in the kitchen. Her hair was short and a little patchy.

She didn’t see us write “STAY STRONG” in rose petals on her lawn, but, on Monday, at school, Julie shrieked and hugged the two of us, hugged us like the ship was sinking and here were two logs in a broken life raft, and she went to prom with Keith. He said nothing ever happened, “nothing except some cloudy intense shit I don’t even understand,” but I didn’t know if I should believe him. I didn’t know how much I cared.

But that night with the roses, the moon was on us. We fought a little over the last petal or two, Keith in front of me, me in front of Keith. Laughing. Joking. Then Keith drove us away. Keith was more confident. Keith always drove. And the whole way back to mine we talked about last summer. About this uniform they made Julie wear at the drive-in, this knock-off nostalgia place where the high school girls put on roller skates and shorts that were too long to be sexy and too short to be chaste, and we let that image hang there, whispering. No music. No more talking. The bluffs cast frozen shadows, and the purity of our intentions sat there between us. Its levels were static and jumpy, all of them muddled as leaves beneath the reddened snow.

Brett Biebel is the author of three collections of flash fiction, 48 Blitz, Winter Dance Party, and Gridlock; and A Mason & Dixon Companion. His work has appeared in many magazines and been selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfiction. He lives, writes, and teaches in Illinois.