Today the milk smells like a barnyard. Grass makes animals taste like animals. Even before her belly swelled, she didn’t want cow in her coffee and now she triple checks the date on the milk carton, counts the days it’s been open on her hand (five). Time has been troublesome since 33 weeks and 4 days ago. She throws the milk away.

*

Moo moo, says the cow in her dream. The cow is her mother 25 years ago at Mt. Kisco Country Club and the moo moo is the long, flowing dress her mother wears because tonight there is a BBQ on the pool’s lawn. They will eat watermelon and roasted pig and corn and the kids will chase fireflies into paper cups while the parents talk and drink bubbles from plastic flutes.

When she awakes, she wonders why her mother called that outfit a moo moo and not what it really could be: a goddess gown.

*

She sits on her leather couch and waits for the lactation consultant. Now, at 40, will her body know what to do? The doorbell rings. As she peels her pink hide from the gray hide, she’s aware of all the flesh around her bones— too much flesh— her diagnoses of pregnant and slightly overweight have creamed together. Even though she can’t see them, she knows the hinds of her legs are now red and stippled.

Knock knock, says Katie the Consultant. 

As she takes her breasts out, she remembers: the pool’s dressing room. It smells like chlorine and spray deodorant, sunscreen and grilled cheese. There are milky-white wooden walls. Every day, she leads her trio to the tampons under the bathroom sink. They peel off the paper and stick their fingers through the cardboard, wondering where to put it and who will put it there first. 

Then they stand on the rickety bench, peering out the windows into the pool area. There is Matt the Lifeguard, eighteen and blond-haired, blue-eyed, lap-swim-muscled; and then, their mothers, gossiping in lounge chairs. Hers wears tennis whites instead of a bathing suit.

*

She alternates making C’s and U’s with her hand over her size G’s. 

It will feel natural, Katie the Consultant is reassuring her. Baby will know what to do.

She is not convinced. 

Will baby know this—that she has never known what to do with her breasts? In the last two decades, she’s fought nature, augmenting them into larger, raised shapes, detaching the nipple and then anchoring it into a higher, perkier place. If baby is a piece of her, severed, will it too, fight nature? 

She contains acres, wide-open pastures of all the people she’s been. And oh, how that body now stretches, stores, expands. Is it natural then, that she should be so concerned about cramping, contracting, shrinking? She’s more worried about fit: into her bikini, into her child’s gaping little mouth.

*

At the pool, her brother, four years younger, always wiggles around with a woggle between his legs and says things like amaze-balls, tiggle-bitties, and awesome-sauce.

*

Katie has brought a plastic baby doll with flanged lips.

Katie models football hold, where baby feeds wedged under the armpit. She wonders what the little toenails will feel like around her back, if they will flounder or grip or curl.

Don’t worry about the arms or legs. Katie the Consultant reads her mind. Baby is used to being smooshed all together.

No one has prepared her for this type of intimacy.

She’s taken aback at how a newborn, like a vampire or a pet, doesn’t eat; it feeds.

*

Ol’ McDonald had a farm, E, I, E, I, O. 

*

Her mother calls from North Carolina after the appointment. 

I finally lost weight and wore a bathing suit, her mother is saying. And your dad, you know how he just hates big boobs. Hates ‘em. He just walked by me, raised his eyebrows, and said Barbarella.

*

These are the words about birth her mother and sister swat around: bloody murder, ripped, freaked out, elderly pregnant, ruined, huge. 

These are the phrases about motherhood her friend—an acquaintance, really—texts about her newborn, age 42 days: exclusively breastfeed, why am i doing this to myself, husband is useless, cried 3x, brain fog, don’t drive anywhere. 

Every text contains a command or a recommendation. You should. Don’t. 

Which fears are her own? This unsolicited chatter swarms into her mind and she is once again frightened. She will be: zombie cow. 

Why not: divine mother? 

*

Her mother refused to change in the pool’s dressing room and her father gladly shelled out for a cabana every season. A windowless 10×10 closet behind the pool’s entrance. One afternoon, a storm rolls through and she and her trio squish inside. Under the thunder, she hears a softer twinkling: laughter, music. She shushes the girls and together they squint through the cabana’s slats.

The teenage lifeguards dance close together. Matt the Lifeguard roams his hands freely over Liz Head Lifeguard’s chest. In front of everyone! No one seems to mind.

Something inside her shifts and she nervously jams the V of her toes into her Achilles’ heel.

The music is low but the lyrics are unmistakable. 

Bwok, bwok, chicken, chicken. Bwok, bwok, chicken heads. 

The words travel from the cluttered, musty lifeguard shack, through the sliding window, and out into the green, impressionable world. 

*

Her mother arrives with a can of formula, just in case.

She doesn’t know that, in those first dark days after baby is born, her breasts will work on an invisible clock that no one, not even Katie, told her about. It will disgust her. She will leak and spurt milk from bedroom to kitchen and her daughter — no longer the anonymous baby— won’t latch and will scream for hours, days, and what seems like years.

Tiggle-bitties. Big ol’ titties. 

Her mother won’t whisper Told you so. She’ll shake the bottle and say See, isn’t this easier?

Ol’ Macdonald had a farm.

The formula will froth. Her daughter will struggle to digest. Time will pass more slowly than those endless summers of girlhood. Together they will pace the kitchen and she will drink cold coffee and track her steps, each one getting her closer and closer back to that body that she never knew what to do with. 

She’ll forget what she was called before she was Sandra’s mom.

E, I, E, I, O.

Christine Aletti has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has most recently appeared in Twyckenham Notes and the Saw Palm Review. She lives with her daughter in Florida, for now.

You emerge from your apartment, wheatfield hair ablaze in the afternoon sun. My big sister, skinny in a form-fitting dress. Today you are 60. I smooth my Hawaiian shirt over my paunch. 

“Birthday girl.” I hand you your gift, a bottle of second-to-cheapest tequila. I got Bellflower Pete to stop at the liquor store before he dropped me off. I’m thinking ahead to what I will drink. How you and I will arrive early and can get in a round or even two before your guests arrive. It’s been so long.

You pass me a tin of gummies and some weed cookies from your job at the dispensary. “For you, Princely.” Your nickname for me; my wife Pia has family money. 

You hold up a finger and vanish inside to put away your gift. You close the door quickly as you always do, leaving me on the step. You think I don’t know about the stacked-up newspapers and books and bottles and cans and CDs and record albums. All the sentimentalia you kept after our mother went. These objects provide you with comfort. I get that.

“Been a while.” I say when you reemerge.

“In the flesh.” Also, before I lost my license, you are nice enough not to say. Before my knee replacement; the botched tropical ale startup.

For a long time, I wondered whether you and I would stay in touch, once our mother went. Like us, she was a person of appetites. We share her face, wide and placid. We two share memories of being taken to the movies, her slipping alone to the back row where her married boyfriend waited. Another time, our mother and us, asked to leave our town’s Octoberfest, because she could barely walk. The face of the lady volunteer: Those poor kids. But life with our mother included small joys. She loved a celebration. And it is I who keep it going, now.

It’s bright outside. I lean against your mailbox as you secure your door, “Hang on, hang on, hang on.” I’m floating lightly. I’ve taken a hydrocodone pill. I tap at my phone and order the cheapest option on the Lyft menu. After she finishes work Pia, a teetotaler, will meet us at the brewery and drive us home.

Our driver is a young Latina in a black SUV. Her posture is very straight. “Your hair is really pretty,” I say.

“Thank you, sir,” she says, and I hear your soft guffaw. She passes the first three onramps. She stays on Western Avenue, even in East Hollywood, which is dodgier than when we grew up. But none of the raggedy characters near the 7/11 or clustered near boarded up storefronts pay us any mind.

“I just got a knee scooter,” you say with your crooked smile. “Well, a neighbor left it behind.” 

“Ooh.”

You add so quietly you are nearly muttering. “Can’t walk more’n a couple of blocks.” I hear you breathing beside me, an unsettlingly intimate sound.

“Since COVID, every time I sit down, I fall asleep,” I offer. I drop my head to my shoulder, eyes empty and tongue lolling. Refreshing your lip gloss, you chuckle. 

“Maybe you have that thing where a person keeps waking themselves up when their breath stops,” you say.

“Ha! Pretty sure my wife would have told me.” Underscoring the difference between us.

“Point taken,” you say sharply. You flash raised hands like a blackjack dealer and turn to the window.

You once told me that if you’d gotten married, you’d have saved hundreds of thousands in online shopping. Partied less. Stayed in good health. The presumption being that if it weren’t for my being married, my life would look a lot more like yours. I thought that was idiotic—why should it be another person’s job to keep us in line? But I have allowed the truth of it to soak in. You know how Pia takes care of me. She tells me when my food is burning, that the tub is about to overflow. Alone, I’d neglect my hygiene. I’d forget to feed the cats or pay our bills and lose my phone. In the end, I’d forget language altogether, reduced to aping lines from television shows and podcasts and graphic tees. 

Like our mother, you and I both hold an unfillable void inside, even as we participate now and then in life’s parade. She was so skinny and jaundiced at the end. Her formerly dancing brown eyes gone flat. The thought of that happening to you makes me swallow hard. I’d be alone, then. The last of our family.

We arrive in San Pedro and gritty Pacific Avenue. I hoist myself out of the car. You are already flitting around to my side. The driver pulls away, heading toward the harbor. To clear the air between us, I defer to you, asking sotto voce what tip I should give.

“Most people don’t even tip,” you answer absently, straightening your dress. 

“How do these drivers afford nice cars, when they get paid so little?”

“I just hope ours doesn’t take that same route all by herself,” you say. I rush to agree. We like thinking of ourselves as concerned for others. I’d told Pia I was worried you had terrible news about your health. I didn’t say I was invited to this shindig after one of my late night calls to you, lonely and high. That you were always cool about these calls and never threw them in my face. 

I crook my arm for you to take. Smiling together at the brewery’s entrance, we make our way across Pacific Avenue, ready for a celebration. We are our mother’s children, after all.

Patricia Quintana Bidar is a western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area, with roots in southern Arizona, Santa Fe, NM, and the Great Salt Lake. Her work has been celebrated in Wigleaf’s Top 50 and widely anthologized, including in Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Microfiction 2023, and Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024. Patricia’s debut collection of short works is coming from Unsolicited Press in December 2025. She lives with her family and unusual dog outside Oakland, California. Visit patriciaqbidar.com.

On the first warm morning of spring, Tom arrives holding half-wilted tulips like a man holding a bouquet of blunt instruments. He says he’s leaving me. For Amsterdam. Not the city—he clarifies—a woman from work. Named Amsterdam.

I do not cry. I do not rage. I do not pull his sweater over his head and pummel him with my fists like we’re in a hockey fight. No. I thank him. I say, Thank you so much, Tom, and close the door behind him, as if he’s just delivered an egg and cheese on poppy.

I don’t know why he brought a gift, but it would certainly make the whole thing worse if I refused it. I place the tulips—ten of them, all pink, smug, idiotic—in a blue Mason jar that’s been in the sink since Thursday. The tulips fan their little legs like debutantes on muscle relaxants. I put the stupid, little bitches in front of the open window by my bed.

Lovely women have fresh flowers in their homes. I read that in the Martha Stewart Living I keep under my toilet plunger. Lovely women don’t get left for women with architecture for legs. I want to be lovely, but my eyelids are heavy with exhaustion and SuperMax XXL Lash Wow! Mascara. In other words, I want to be unconscious.

I unzip my skirt like I’m shedding the fiction of who I thought I was. I remove the tastefully slutty blouse and distastefully supportive bra that I had so carefully picked for what I assumed would be a surprise brunch date. It’s horrific how excited I was. I collapse in bed. Flannel sheets from Costco. Grey and bleak, and so am I. The mattress groans. The tulips, meanwhile, look thrilled to be here. I can hear birds singing outside, and I hate them for it.

In another life, I was a sparrow. I sang loudly and often and took breadcrumbs from kindly strangers. I never once opened a shared phone plan with someone who said “babe” too often.

If I was a sparrow, I would be lapping at a glass of wine or pure love or whatever it is they drink in Amsterdam. This is not something I know. I have never had the occasion to get a passport. I’m not a globe-trotting hussy. My knowledge is limited to the Wikipedia page I skimmed after wondering what would possess someone to name a baby after a place half a world away. My guess is that it was a “creative” riff off one of those glossy city-names—Brooklyn, Paris, London—meant to sound worldly and sophisticated.

I’ve seen her photos, once, back when I was still trying not to be the kind of woman who Googles. But I Googled. It was after I saw her name on Tom’s phone. My first thought was, “oh, she’s lovely.” She has a face like a milk commercial. Her voice is a high-end essential oil. She probably doesn’t even try—or worse, pretends she doesn’t.

That’s the trick, isn’t it? Lovely women pull off femininity like backflips off the high dive. I’ve been trying so hard, since before I even met Tom. I smile at strangers. I go to Pilates. I say “sure” more often than “no”. I shave my body hair so that I’m smooth and blank.  Tom liked that about me, that I was “cool.” An iceberg. 

I watch the overripe tulips as morning turns into noon into everything after. One by one their petals fall, indecent and slow. He loves me. He loves me not. The petals scatter like little, pink casualties until there’s only one flower still perfectly intact in the ragged bunch. I reach from my supine position and pluck it out of the jar. I hold it to my nose, my lips. Then I bite. It tastes like pesticides and greenery. I chew and chew and chew the flower like cud.

Tulip madness. That’s what they called it. That’s what Amsterdam was famous for—at least according to Wikipedia. I think I understand something now, even if I’m not sure what it is.

I run to the bathroom and kneel on the floor. I vomit, knees pressed to the cold tile, hands gripping the rim as if I might fall through. The petals come up last—chewed, soft and blushing, floating wreckage in the toilet bowl. He loves me not.

I wash my mouth out in the sink. My lips are blood red, and my cheeks glow feverishly. My eyes shine—not with health, but with a kind of recognition. I look like someone I haven’t seen in a while. Not lovely, the way Amsterdam must appear when she enters a room like a neatly wrapped present, but raw and unruly.

I am already so alive.

I open the window all the way and lean out. It smells like warm dirt and a strange, feverish bloom. The birds are shrieking. They do not care if they sound lovely when they open their mouths. I scream back.

Sarah Chin is a writer with a day job in politics. Her work has been published in Epiphany, HAD, SmokeLong Quarterly, Points in Case, Sine Theta Magazine, and more. She lives in Chicago, Illinois and was born in the Year of the Fire Rat, which pretty much sums her up. More of her work can be found at sarahchin.net.

Loie Hollowell, Two centimetres dilated, 2023

I’m telling Ben about the heist I read about, how she distracted the security guard while he went upstairs and plucked a painting off the gallery wall. ‘De Kooning!’ I crow. It still thrills me. ‘No one even knew until they died!’

It’s late. Ben watches me from the end of the couch, that pinch to his eyes. ‘Should we call the midwife?’

‘What? No.’ I wave an irritated hand. We have miles to go. Miles. I reach the end of the living room and turn. ‘But I haven’t even told you about the best bit. He—’

‘Slow down.’

‘—Wore a fake moustache. That was it, the whole disguise!’ I keep playing it over, how anyone could just stroll in like that. No real plan, just a dollar-store stick-on and a baggy coat. That’s what I marvel at. How either of them thought it could be alright. But I only manage a few more steps before I’m hissing through my teeth again. The pain is red, orange, magenta, black. Pulling me wide.

Dana Schutz, Breastfeeding, 2015

She was on a plane, long-haul flight somewhere. Her baby was crying so she fed him, like they tell you to do, to calm him. But then she fell asleep. This is what I think about, at three, four, five in the morning, whatever broken time it is, willing myself to stay awake so I don’t suffocate my child and turn into one of those mothers on the news.

The bedroom door creaks and Ben shuffles out to check on me. Also because last week at the clinic, the midwife gave him a pamphlet on postnatal depression. ‘These are the signs,’ she’d said, like she was already thinking about what kind of muffin to get on her break. ‘You should both look out for them.’ And now he is, because he’s like that, and I am pretending I can’t see the doubt in his eyes, the way he studies me. It was his idea, the baby. I thought I could. At least, I told him I could.

The tap runs in the kitchen. Ben sets the glass of water beside me and bends over the back of the couch. His breath is warm on my neck. ‘Look at him,’ he whispers, because love is no problem for him. Love comes easy. ‘Look at his little eyes, rolling back like that. He’s so bloody drunk.’ 

The glass is the only still thing in the painting.

Julie Rrap, SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders), 2024 

Those mothers. The ones who are never on the news. The ones who say, Just heading down the club for a bit, there’s baked beans in the cupboard, and sort your brother while you’re at it. The ones who tell you, Don’t ever get knocked up, worst mistake of my life. The ones who, if you reach for the remote, might suddenly lance their cigarette into the back of your hand. 

‘I don’t know how to do this,’ I tell Ben, our son in my arms. A weight now. A squalling leviathan and he knows. He knows I’m failing him and it breaks me into a million tiny pieces. I do everything I’m meant to. I feed him. I change him. But it’s not enough. And maybe if I’d had a different mother, the love would flow just fine. Maybe it wouldn’t always get so tangled in the constant terror. 

Ben somehow manages to hold us both. ‘But you are,’ he says into my hair, the same thing the midwife taught him to say in the delivery room. ‘You already are. You’re doing it.’ 

Around us, the gallery creaks with other people’s footsteps. The two bronze women rise tall, the one balanced on the other’s shoulders, working together, feeling their way. My son, fifteen now, young leviathan indeed, hunches into his embarrassment. He wants to but he can’t quite face it. These two old women in their nudity.

Grace Cossington Smith, The Window, 1956

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I say, when my son asks what I see in it all. ‘This and that.’

He’s uncomfortable here. Doesn’t like the quiet, or the feeling that he’s missing something. ‘It’s just a window,’ he says again. ‘I mean it’s pretty, but is that it?’ Like every teenager is always saying. What else is there?

He looks back at the entrance. The crowds drift past on their way to the main exhibition. He wants to be with them, not out here in the wings. No headsets. No trim explanations. I could tell him, Yes, it’s just a window. I could tell him how his father used to plant his hands on my shoulders when he caught me standing there dreaming. How rituals are made, over and over. How eventually I told him I was thinking about my mother and how I was just the same and he said, The fuck you are. Don’t even think it. 

Ben has already found a bench. I watch him across the gallery, squeezing his bad knee. ‘Maybe you could take your dad to the café?’ I say. That is, after all, why the two of them cooked up this plan. The view from the sculpture deck. The pistachio crème brûlées. A nice mother’s day treat. ‘You can get us a good table. Go on, love. I won’t be far behind.’

He is taller than his father now, has the same worry to his eyes, but the uncertainty doesn’t last long. He’s too hungry, for everything. Too eager to see what comes next. He nods at me and goes to collect his father from the bench. And I know exactly how it would feel. A small canvas, maybe. Nothing grand. The tidy weight of it tucked under one arm. The quiet surprise of making it down all those steps and out into the street.

Jane O’Sullivan is an Australian writer. Her art writing appears in Vault, Apollo, Art Monthly, Art Guide and many others. Her fiction has won the Rachel Funari Prize and joanne burns Microlit Award and also been published in Meanjin, Bull, Peatsmoke, Passages North, New Flash Fiction Review, Milk Candy Review and the Spineless Wonders anthologies Pulped Fiction and Play. She lives on Bidjigal and Gadigal Land in Sydney and is online at janeosullivan.com.au and @sightlined.