Category: micro monday

On Writing an Obituary While Listening to My Christian Sister and My Jewish Husband Argue about the Speed at Which My Dead Mother Is Being Laid to Rest  |  Shannon Frost Greenstein

They coded my mother for fifteen minutes while her three children debated the definition of “no extraordinary measures.”

Later that night, I fed her geriatric cat in the bowels of her empty condo and felt the blunt blade of grief take up permanent residence behind my xiphoid process.

Then there were meetings and phone calls and a staggering selection of urns, estate lawyers and death certificates and trips to the airport, a convening of my family tree in my hometown of old, a pilgrimage to the past with no hope of reaching Mecca, because Mecca is just another way to say “mother” and my mother is dead. 

Two days later, my apartment is stuffed to bursting with flowers and nephews and the growing pile of laundry with which I cannot bring myself to grapple; and we are checking action items off a list, like a morbid scavenger hunt to erase a human life one credit card statement at a time.

I am the writer. I am elected to pen the obituary. I am daunted by this existential responsibility.

I try to capture in words the woman who bore me, the woman who both fucked me up and loved me at the very same time; backspacing, cutting and pasting, deleting clauses, typing the same sentence over and over again.

This is all just happening disrespectfully fast, opines my sister, a byproduct of the same Lutheran upbringing that has led me to an atheistic Humanism. Why can’t we take any time to breathe? 

It’s been 48 hours, responds my husband, the former Mrs. Greenstein’s good Jewish boy, sorting through my dead mother’s effects. Why isn’t she buried? Why aren’t we eating yet? 

This is all because of end-of-life expenses, I remind my sister; that’s what you get for marrying a shicksa, I inform my soulmate. 

And as I blunder through a description of my mom’s naval service, her gift for nursing that was really more like a calling, I manage to smile through the tears already soaking my cheeks at the juxtaposition of Judeo and Christian, and the quirky customs we’ve somehow all embraced regarding the best ways to honor our dead.  

But I also really just want my mom back.

About the Author:

Healing Tobacco  |  Amanda Callais

The swing set shines in the South Louisiana sun. Silver. Blue. Mine. It beckons me out of the air-conditioned house into the backyard’s sticky heat. Hand over small hand, I grip the ladder’s warm rails. Not too loose. Not too tight. Just right. I am almost at the top when I feel the sting.  

Pain sears through my hand. Burning. Throbbing. Swelling. My shrill 5-year-old scream pierces the silent summer day, sending Papaw and Mom running. 

The sweet smell of tobacco that is Papaw fills my nostrils as he lifts me screaming from the ladder, setting me down on the bottom of the slide. He kneels beside me.  Eye-level, he lifts my swelling pink hand in his dark calloused one. 

“Wasps,” he mutters. 

I shrink.

“Tobacco,” he tells Mom. 

Reaching into the front pocket of his blue work shirt, he pulls out a clump of loose leaves usually reserved for his pipe. Hand tucked into my lap, I wail louder, gulping hot air. If it bothers him, he doesn’t let on. He just puts the tobacco in his mouth, wetting it with his spit until the leaves transform into a thick paste he spreads over the sting. Tobacco. Spit. Spread. Repeat, until my hand is a brown lump of spit-soaked tobacco. 

My sobs slow as numbness sets in. Clear-eyed, I stare into his work-hardened face. Small beads of sweat dot his olive brow. A large drop slides down his temple. Thinning black and gray hair curls in front, a perfect Q right at the center. His eyes light up his dark skin. 

I breathe in. 

Though he lives next door, I have known him only from afar. Tall. Strong. Stern. Today, I see him for the first time. Up close. I am no longer scared. I am in awe.

About the Author:

Murmuration | Lisa Cooper Ellison

The starlings explode from a nearby tree then dance overhead in a synchronized tangle of chatter and wings. Later that day, I tell my mentor and share a new word: murmuration. It’s his second week of chemo treatment for a second cancer. He’s paying attention to nature and its signs, which makes me pay attention too. We find hope in snapped twigs, grazing deer, and a sunrise refracting off a crystal vase. Past losses have taught us that life is like those birds pirouetting across the sky—art in motion that flies off too soon. 

About the Author:

Dungeons and Dragons is | Ryan Stiehl

calling an upside-down Sonic cup the demon lord Zuggtmoy.

an act of quiet rebellion in the fantasy section of a North Texas Public Library.

a gateway into pulp fiction and bad acting and not caring about either.

a way to begin writing fiction in earnest in high school.

a way of saying hello.

collectively hallucinating that loose change and checker pieces were goblins and heroes around Eva’s dad’s game table when she used to live there.

not worth my family’s distrust, though they’ve gotten better now.

a sanctuary from the intense Texas summer heat outside.

my first experience using they/them to talk to my friend’s barbarian.

finding out my entire first party was gay and/or trans over the course of three years. Well, everyone but me.

where an evil wizard orchestrates his own demise in Castle Ravenloft.

the subject of fierce debate in the Southern Baptist community even today.

finding a clever answer to the 1,500 pound problem of an oncoming, raging stone giant against all odds.

eating Domino’s pepperoni pizza while Sam rolls damage for sneak attack. Needless to say, I have plenty of time to finish my pizza.

being called “culturally gay” for the first time. I still puzzle over what the hell that even means.

slowly realizing I’m the odd one out in my party.

long nights staring at a blank Google document that’s supposed to be ready for tomorrow night’s session.

making Saturday night a sort of holy day.

wishing I were writing for Dungeons and Dragons while I lose my faith in a First Baptist Church.

commemorating Grant’s fallen paladin with an ever-vigilant constellation.

helping a former friend escape their homophobic parents and helping them hide in Washington.

practice calling my friend of eighteen years Ophelia now.

creating the same stories that I’ll treasure dearly for years to come.

realizing that my friends would rather play Thirsty Sword Lesbians or Monster of the Week now.

a way of knowing the glory days are long past

a way of saying, “I’m still glad to have known you all back then.”

About the Author:

Ryan Stiehl is an aspiring creative writer currently living in North Texas. When he is not playing TTRPGs with friends, spending time with his wife and husky-malamute, or working a “real job,” he is fast asleep and would like to remain so, thank you very much.

Alary Things | Hilary Fair

Millie fills her chair. Fills the room with her voice. Arms crossed over plump chest over pink robe, she asks if I want to see something amazing.  

I do not.  

I want to continue staring into my iPhone at a cheeky-bottomed swimsuit I will not buy because I cannot afford it and because my ass is soft and pocky from sitting through too many COVID-years inside. 

It is Monday and my mood is drab as the gray-beige paint in here, the misting rain outside. I’m immune to the peppy, highlighter-pink of my gown. Unmoved by the stickers stuck to the mirrors promising: You are beautiful.  

Millie leans in anyway, holding out her own iPhone. Despite myself, I look. On it, a picture her daughter took of a lone cirrus cloud, its wispy, fleeting body immortalized against a blue Kitsilano sky. 

Here in Ontario, spring has been endlessly damp after the darkest winter recorded in seventy-three years. Here in this mammography lab, Millie and I sit in our robes, waiting for techs with gentle hands to lift and tuck and squeeze and photograph our tissues. 

“An angel wing,” I say, lingering on the image.  

Millie sits back, satisfied. 

An older woman once taught me to look for hearts. I find them easily now—in tree burls and beach stones and, once, a clump of cat litter.  

A tech appears, beckoning to me, and I leave Millie behind. She’s still in her chair, still has arms crossed over plump chest over pink robe.  

Neither of us knows, yet, what our scans will reveal. Or that the sun will peek through today. Or that in the coming weeks I will think of Millie when I notice the alary quality of other things: the arc of a rain-soaked cedar frond pasted to a shingled roof; the curve of a dried milkweed pod backlit by sun and lake and sky; a photograph from an animal sanctuary, showing a cluster of kittens, their tiny bodies feathering out from a shared food bowl, creating a patchy-but-perfect wing.

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