Author: amykly

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A Weekday, Four O’Clock (nominated for a Pushcart Prize)

I missed my mother, so I put on her wedding gown and veil while watching daytime TV. One Life to Live had been her favorite because of the cold open, those ghost faces superimposed over landmarks in a fictional town where she planned to remake herself real. I was partial to the one with the hourglass running out while the voiceover said a simile about dwindling days because even then I was desperate to know how people passed time. General Hospital was on, not one of our favorites, but I’d screwed up the time slot. We’d disliked Laura and Luke’s wedding for different reasons, my mother because they wasted money, me because I was seven and didn’t want to marry anyone but my mother.  continue reading

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The Grand Mothering

I meant to birth children but they slipped my mind. I should have ransom-noted a reminder with the black and white word-magnets on my aughts refrigerator, though those sudden stories trended toward pronoun erasure and my sketchy memory, even as a twenty-something, would have slotted a roommate as the directive’s addressee. My likely fragments on that fridge: write stories blendingly, travel blind, rest noons. The roommates mothered one by one despite wino pacts to sister off together into cinematic sunsets…

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Seizures

Age 8

Your mother has a seizure on the front lawn after grocery shopping and you stand there wondering what you’ll have for dinner as a can of peas and a jar of sauce roll into the cul-de-sac where you ride your bike and play freeze tag. An ambulance swallows her. Eleven months later, you’ll watch her gleaming coffin lowered into the dull dirt and you’ll watch your father slowly spiral into relentless grief that lays waste to your house until the bank finally forecloses and you move from apartment to apartment to apartment…