Alexis throws a big party and everyone’s invited. She lives a half-hour drive from her childhood home, the one with the big bay window and the basement where we had sleepovers every other weekend for most of high school. 

I imagine she’s done well for herself. Her new townhome is in the affluent suburb that kids in our marginally less affluent suburb used to mock. Her Instagram is all pictures of her rescue corgi. Her Facebook is all tagged photos of her at friends’ weddings and thirtieth birthdays, but she’s not thinking about any of them right now. Tonight, she’s fifteen again, and she’s worried I won’t show.

It’s a cool summer evening in Minnesota. From the street I can see the glow of the string lights crisscrossing her treeless backyard. Citronella wafts through the air. I imagine there are two coolers on the concrete patio. The one on the right is stocked with beer and sparkling water. The one on the left is full of Monster Energy Drinks, the Zero Ultra flavor we were obsessed with in tenth grade. Alexis used to buy them two-for-three on her way to our 7 a.m. social studies class. She’s wearing a bracelet made from the can tabs we saved.

Teo’s the first guest to arrive. He pedals down the sidewalk on his childhood mountain bike. I crouch in my car when he passes by. Alexis notices the Jersey in his accent. She asks him, as she will ask everyone, how he knows me. 

He says we met Thanksgiving weekend twenty-five years ago, oh, maybe twenty-two. I was in town visiting my cousins. We were playing basketball in the driveway when he rode up and asked if we wanted to play Nintendo. I loved Nintendo and I hated my cousins, but they were older than me, and they hated Teo. They said he was weird, and when I asked why, they said I was weird too. I’d heard this before. I thought if I could make them like me then it wouldn’t be true.

Michaela comes in as Teo’s finishing his story. She carries her sharpie-covered JanSport on one shoulder, all cool and casual. She shrugs it off to dig for the mix CD she burned for the evening. 

Michaela and I—we shared a cabin at summer camp. We bonded over emo music and the art of tie-dye. We exchanged numbers. She called my house twice that August. I let the phone ring as I tried and failed to conjure a voice full of carefree enthusiasm, the self I could be away from myself. She couldn’t know that the real me was awkward and uncertain, that camp-me was a façade. This was years before I knew to call it fear, not fraud. Michaela left a couple of voicemails. She shrugs like, what are you gonna do?

Alexis nods. That is so like me.

The fashionably late arrive in clusters. Coworkers from my first full-time job sit on the kitchen counter sipping PBRs. Some of my sisters’ friends make friends with my brothers’ friends and share the wisdom I was too awkward to ask for: how to print in pretty bubble letters; how to tell when someone like-likes you, how to tell when someone likes you at all. 

The nice busboy from my short-lived waitressing career is using chunks of cheese to teach Alexis’ corgi to sit. He tells her about the time I got awful hives from the wool scarf I wore to work. He brought Benadryl, just in case. He asks if I RVSPed. Alexis lies and says I texted her to say I’m running late. She doesn’t want people to give up on me just yet.

The biochem TA offers charcuterie to the cute librarian who works the closing shift. The rec league volleyball team I quit after two practices arrives in two consecutive carpools. They dance ironically, and then, a few drinks in, it’s not ironic anymore.

And then they hear it: the drumline’s cadence, the drum major’s whistle. The crowd flows into the front yard to see my high school marching band chair-stepping up the street. Their teenage bodies carry the muscle memory of these instruments, and some of them are really, really good. Someone jumps on the upright piano and leads the living room in a singalong of “Don’t Stop Believing.” The party is in full swing. All that’s missing is me.

I’m still outside, sure I’m about to go home but not ready to admit it yet. I’ll wait in my car five more minutes, and then I’ll go in. I’ll walk through the front door and everyone will cheer, like I’m a fan favorite in a sitcom. There’ll be a big sheet cake decorated with loopy icing in the shape of my name. Everyone will want to know what I’ve been up to, how I’ve been. No one will be mad at me for not calling or texting them back.

I have a minute left when Alexis steps into the front yard, carrying a corner slice of cake on a paper plate. I watch over the steering wheel as she tiptoes between the instruments scattered on the grass. She finds a clear spot to sit cross-legged with the plate in her lap. She looks down the street, down the way I came, and waits for me.

We had every one of our sleepovers at her place, every other weekend for about three years. Then one day, we didn’t. A month went by, and then another. Growing up I often felt, sometimes I still feel, there had been a lesson in kindergarten about how to be a person in the world on a day that I, and only I, had missed. I had wanted to invite Alexis over and return the favor. For a long time, I didn’t know how.

Now everyone inside is getting to know each other and having a good time. Alexis should be inside having a good time. Someone should ask her how she knows me. She was kind enough to host, after all.

I shut the car door behind me. Alexis’ ponytail whips around at the sound. She waves me over and says she’s so glad I’m here, even if the part of the party that was for me is over. The cake has been cut; the end time on the invitation has come and gone. The music is louder than ever. Colored lights flash in the windows. That party, she says, has taken on a life of its own.

She doesn’t ask me to go inside. We sit in the grass and split the slice, taking turns taking bites. The can tab bracelet shushes softly on her wrist. It’s just how I remember it—two of the tabs face the wrong way, their silver underbellies exposed. We watch as guests slowly trickle home in new configurations of designated drivers and rideshares. For each one she says, look. They came here for you. Isn’t that nice? Everyone together, here tonight, and it’s all because of you.

Mackenzie McGee is a winner of the 2021 Pen/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction can be found in Nat. Brut, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cease, Cows, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from the University of Arkansas, and she’s currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Kansas.

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.