Birds have started gathering outside my window. Pigeons mostly, watching me through the rusting metal bars.

Nurses call them His messengers. They tell me: Wait.

By month twenty-seven, I’ve given up asking what for.

You were never wanted, I tell you. I used to whisper this, but with time, I’ve gotten bolder.

Initially, it was anger. Resentment wrapped its tendrils around my tongue and oozed poison through the spaces between my teeth. Every gap, a reminder of my own parents’ shortcomings.

Like grief, it evolved. Next, into an apology. I didn’t mean it, this. To bring you into all of it. I’m barely enough for myself, and he was never enough for me.

You kick me in the ribs to remind me to make space for self-pity. Everything hurt and I was dying, I often thought, my cheek pasted to the cool porcelain of the toilet while I tried to rid myself of you, of me. Of the three bites of a sausage that made it down, momentarily.

Sometimes, it feels silly even. You were never wanted. Ain’t that something? Yet here you are, a little moon that has risen but won’t set, tucked beneath my shrinking King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard T-shirt.

At first, I tried to hide you while I figured out what to do with you. Even at five months, it was doable.

Postterm pregnancy, they called it. But by week forty-five, they were stumped. They would have once cut me open to tear you out, but that was no longer an option. Medicine has been infected by the will of God, and his will is to kill us sometimes, I guess.

By month eighteen, my body officially belonged to the state.

I’m too big to move now. They bring me nutritional shakes with lots of calories and protein. Knockoff Ring Dings and Ho Hos if I start to make a ruckus. Sometimes, I race the round little pastries down my belly to pass the time.

There’s something else there too, you know. A bizarre attachment to a small person who suckles on your soul whenever he feels hungry. Who turns your innards into a piñata when he’s bored.

I like you every now and then. I love you, even, against my will.

A robin lands on the windowsill, its red breast stark against the ashen cement.

I reach for him.

Wait, he tells me. Be patient.

But I’ve been patient enough.

I roll from the bed and bounce off my belly to my feet. I can barely fit my swollen hand through the bars. Just enough to grab the robin by its neck and bring it to my mouth.

Please, it begs. I’m your baby too.

I don’t listen. I put the robin in my mouth and swallow him whole.

Take slow, deep breaths. In and out. Controlled breathing.

One-two-three, one-two-three.

Something wet lands on my foot. Blood runs from my inner thigh and down my leg as my whole body turns to chaos.

Terri waits in line at The Great American Organ Exchange, liver in hand. There’s a man ahead of her, clutching a brownish-red heart to his chest. He mumbles a prayer in Hebrew.

A cart rounds the corner, pushed by a teenager zigzagging along the length of the line. “Ice here! Get ya ice! Only $15 per bag!”

“Ice?” Terri says, noticing the coolers scattered along the sidewalk and clear plastic bags with chilled kidneys, lungs, and pancreases. “Does it need to be refrigerated?”

An older woman wearing combat boots puts her hand on Terri’s shoulder. “Oh, honey,” she says, holding up a box of intestines resting on cooler packs. “That pretty slab of meat you got there won’t last very long in this heat. Then again, there are still some sporadic showers. Could get lucky a second time.”

But Terri refuses to take any more chances. She zooms over to the pimply-faced hustler and scans his Venmo code.

One week prior, Terri thought for sure she was a goner. The ascites in her stomach made her look pregnant. Her doctor told her she needed a liver transplant.

“Am I gonna die?” Terri asked.

“Without a transplant, yes.”

“And what are the chances of me getting one before I kick the bucket?”

The doctor bit her lower lip. “Right now? Honestly? Close to zero. Between safer cars, people quitting cigarettes, wearable health monitors, and everyone suddenly doing reformer Pilates, people simply aren’t dying young in sufficiently useful ways anymore. Fewer deaths mean fewer harvestable organs.”

Terri was never one to sit back and accept her fate. She emptied all the liquor in her house down the drain and dialed up her friend Anaya. Anaya’s grandmother is a well-known yogi back in India and was once even featured in Vogue.

“Can you please ask Nani to do a healing spell for me?”

“Nani doesn’t do spells,” Anaya replied, “but she can lift whatever’s blocking your chakra. Just hang on while I text her.”

The next day, the sky rained organs.

Terri caught a liver in her hydrangeas and spent the morning protecting it from her neighbor’s golden retriever. By noon, she was at the Organ Exchange.

“Next?” shouts a nurse in purple scrubs.

“Hello,” says Terri, stepping forward. “I’d like this liver put inside my body, please.”

“You got insurance?”

“Yes. It’s, um, GoodLuck America.”

The nurse looks down at her clipboard. “We don’t take that.”

“Why not? You need insurance. I have insurance. Who cares what kind it is?”

“That’s just how it works. You don’t like it, you and your new friend can take a ride up to Canada.”

Terri sighs. “Look. I brought my own organ. I just need someone to put it in. Do you take Visa?”

Six hours later, Terri wakes with cotton mouth and a belly full of staples.

A different nurse enters the room with a piece of paper in his hand. “Ma’am. Your bill.”

Terri looks at the number, her mouth falling open in shock. “$47,941.74?! But I brought my own liver!”

The nurse shrugs and walks out.

Terri reaches for her phone on the side table to text Anaya.

“Hey girl,” she types. “Can Nani unblock my wallet chakra next?”

Do you remember that night? The way the crescent moon shone through a single cloud. The soft hum of crickets. The frogs leaping frantically to safety as your footsteps drew nearer the lake. Do you remember the countless times your mother told you not to walk alone at night, no matter what, regardless of how safe you were, how aware, because you just never know—

Crouched among the lily pads, I remembered other things.

That day in church: a pearl-studded heel peeking around the pew. Me, sprawled in a heap of hair and secondhand cotton while the room crescendoed into “ha-ha.” The same tune as the day before, when a “kick me” sign (real original) swung from my fraying tunic. Because being smart was uncool, but being poor was the greater sin.

Then you appeared along the shoreline, a song screaming from your headphones:

“And when her father he came home/He said, ‘Where is my daughter gone?’”

I thought: she’d never tell anyone she likes “The Butcher Boy.”

I thought: she’s secretly just like me.

Did you know I was there, holding my breath as you passed? Or did I fade into the background, as always, when nobody was there to tell you “good job?”

Do you remember the night? Or is it as the atheists say, and I’m the only one left with this?

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I remember the birth: six hours of hard labor, blood. A nurse’s hand. A scream. Then, a naked stranger, plopped on my chest.

I remember the death: Six minutes from my house to his apartment. A broken window. His body. Another scream.

I remember the funeral: six feet between us. A whole world. A bit of dirt. Faceless mourners. Smart boy, they said. Wasted potential.

Then, six years: as if it never happened. As if it was all that had happened between then and now.

***

The cemetery smells of fresh soil, crisp air, flower buds—new life mocking its tenants. Something stirs within me, a flutter deep in my belly. A knock on my rib cage, my bones ringing: let me out. Frantic, I rip off my jeans, arching my back as my legs spread wide, the wind filling my womb like the roiling of primordial chaos.

I pull a knife from my coat pocket and flick it open, carve myself in half in one swift motion, then thrust my muddy hand inside me and yank at a knot of slime-coated hair.

A man with vomit green flesh and maggots falling like tears from his hollow eye sockets slides out from between my legs. As he spits the putrid creatures from his cracked lips he looks into my eyes and cries, “Mommy? Mommy what have you done to me?”

I crawl toward his head and hold it in my bosom, rock him back and forth, and whisper, “baby, you are perfect.”

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Uncle Johnny lies comatose in a hospital bed beside us while we all go about our business.

Ma is sitting in a chair, being dramatic. Staring at a screen that I think detects brain activity.

“What is that, Maryann?” she asks, whenever there’s a spike, making sure everyone knows that she still believes in miracles.

I put my arm around her. The affection makes me uncomfortable because it feels so insincere. But I look around the room, and everyone’s partnered up but her. They’ve all got kids and husbands, and I lost a brother too—how can I let her go at it alone?

“How old is Uncle Johnny?” I ask.

“Sixty-eight,” Ma says. “He would’ve been sixty-nine in August.”

“He would have loved that age.”

She doesn’t react, so I don’t know if she doesn’t hear me, the Ativan is too strong, she doesn’t get the joke, or she just doesn’t think it’s all that funny. The fourth one is fair—death is no laughing matter.

Except it is. At least in my family.

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*NOTE: I’m resharing this story—originally titled “Mummy of Marirtyef”—because Australian Writers’ Centre just announced today that it was selected as one of the top stories for the Furious Fiction: July 2026 Story Showcase!

Everyone is here to see the Mummy of Marirtyef.

The placard tells me she’s a woman. 50s. Intermediate period, 2100-2040 BC. Excavated in 1912 by Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition.

‘The same year the Titanic sank,’ I think. Because Hollywood did that one. Because Leonardo DiCaprio stole my nine-year-old heart and Rose DeWitt Bukater inspired my prom hairstyle.

A little boy grips his father’s hand and demands he look at her blue faience beads.

“Ain’t that somethin’?” the dad says, with tentative disinterest. Unsure of how much weight he wants to channel into her existence in the 20 seconds or so that he examines the silhouette of her body, plastered in linen and four-thousand-year-old grime.

They move along with the flow of the crowd. One person, then the next, as I remain planted in front of the glass casing.

It must be odd to be made a spectacle of by strangers. To be stared at by little boys and parents with things like 401ks because what’s that to a mummy anyway? Wouldn’t she want them to know how she lived her life?

Do they know anything of her beyond this placard? Whether she bathed her children in the Nile, or believed dreams were portals to the supernatural, or felt most herself spinning flax into thread before weaving it into linen for her family’s clothing?

And did they know you listened to “Hips Don’t Lie” on repeat after dad left us for another woman, your best Shakira voice seeping through the creases in my door on a Sunday morning? Your voice and sunshine: two mortal enemies to my teenage sleep schedule.

Did they see it when you’d pull my whole body into your lap and coo there, there, patting my back with your open palm? Raking your unpolished fingernails against my scalp until I fell asleep and all was well. Three or twenty-three—my age didn’t matter.

And when they shook my hand and said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” did they understand the weight of it? That I was forever changed and my walking encyclopedia, my temple of knowledge, was swallowed by the thickness of time.

A college student bumps into me, spilling cold coffee down my brand-new white blouse. It slicks my mother’s blue beads, the ones she chose not to take with her.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, not sure what to do with her hands. Wanting to fix it, but too modest to touch my breasts.

I point to the sign above the entryway: NO FOOD OR BEVERAGE.

She looks at it, then at me, her mouth opening and closing around another apology.

Then she is gone too, absorbed into the soft, shuffling procession of the living.

NOTE: “A ‘drabble’ is a short piece of fiction that is exactly 100 words in length.” -Wikipedia

I buckle Ma into the passenger’s seat and head for the interstate.

“Remember how you always wanted to go to Vegas?”

She’d played cards with the fellas back in the ‘40s, when it was unladylike to haunt barrooms alone.

We pull into the garage for the Golden Nugget. I unstrap Ma and put her in my pocket.

“Sit tight,” I say. “You’ll get your legs soon enough.”

The elevator lets us off on the casino floor. I grab a drink from a waitress’ tray, unscrew Ma, and pour her in.

We sit down at a table. Ace and queen.

Blackjack.

** NOTE: I’m going to share something a little different today. I’ve started working on my second novel while the first is out on submission with my agent. I’ve changed up my genre this time, and it’s really out of my comfort zone. BUT…I’m enjoying it! It’s a YA/spec fiction crossover. Can you guess what it’s about based on the prologue?

TRIGGER WARNING: mental health; mentions of suicide

PROLOGUE:

I was never a bitch with inflatable furniture. I didn’t get Dunkaroos and crustless sandwiches in a metallic lunchbox. Cathy—that’s my “mother”—never waited for me in the pickup line after school. All I know about my dad is that he’s one of three guys my mom was banging in high school before she dropped out because she got too fat to hide her pregnancy anymore. She thinks it was probably this dude named Carlos, but only because I get really tan in the summertime. I think I’m just white though—I’m really pale otherwise—which means it’s probably Ben or Jerry.

No, I am not a potential ice cream heiress—some kind of “Eskimo Brothers” concoction of vanilla and Nilla Wafer bits. There are just a lot of men around Cathy’s age named Jerry in Arkansas, so if you sleep around often enough, you’re bound to stumble into bed with one eventually. And Ben? He was a coincidence. But I kind of hope it was Ben, because Cathy says he was smart and tough, and right now I could really use some of that DNA.

A blonde lady in a pink velour tracksuit races toward me, the bedazzled rhinestones across her chest refracting the sunlight pouring through the gaping hole in the hospital ceiling.

Disco tits, I think. Bedazzled boobies.

She lifts a pair of fabric scissors above her head—something she must’ve brought with her. They’d never have those lying around in McLean, not with all of us constantly trying to slit our own wrists and whatnot.

Sparkly Superballs.

I smirk. That’s the thing about dissociation: I can almost slow down time. I can think this lady’s going to kill me and I wish my boobs looked like that at the exact same time and feel completely nonchalant about both.

And then? Then I can figure out what I need to do to survive.

I square up, ready to fight—for my life, and for the lives of those just like me.

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[Producer]: What was it like growing up in Kermit?

[Donna]: Oh, I reckon it was about the same as growin’ up in any other little town. Except maybe in other towns, your daddy’s insulin needles don’t start goin’ missing. Daddy’s diabetic.

[*John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Road*]

[Voiceover]: Bearing the name of Kermit Roosevelt, son of Theodore Roosevelt, the town now carries a darker distinction—as one of the earliest and most devastating flashpoints in America’s opioid crisis.

[Donna]: We ain’t here to talk about me growin’ up, though. I agreed to do this because y’all said I’d get to tell Alby’s story.

[Producer]: Okay. So, tell us: Who is Alby?

[Donna]: He was my brother. Still is, far as I’m concerned. That don’t change just because he’s gone.

___

[Margaret]: My boy was sunshine on a cloudy day. Lord, when he walked into a room, you knew it. I ain’t never seen anything like it, the way people flocked to him. But then he took that job at the apple orchard down the road.

___

[Donna]: Most of what you see on TV about people like us is either, “Poor kid got a prescription for a shoulder injury,” or, “Her mama and daddy were bad news, so what’d you expect from their kids?” But that wasn’t us. My folks weren’t perfect, but they loved us. There was never any question about that.

___

[Margaret]: I’m the first one to say my children made their own choices, but those older boys Alby started runnin’ around with were bad news. Everybody knew it. Nobody said a word, though. Around here, folks keep secrets till they turn rotten.

___

[Donna]: An orchard farmer Alby worked with gave him his first OC. I can’t tell you his name. He’s locked up now, but he’s still got people around here.

[Producer]: OC?

[Donna]: Oxycontin.

___

[Margaret]: He hid it real well. We didn’t suspect a thing at first. Then little things started goin’ missing. Donna’s birthday money. My mother’s antique vase, God rest her soul. Then it was bigger things—the kind you couldn’t explain away. My husband’s insulin needles. My wedding ring. I feel like we—

[Producer]: Do you need a minute?

[Maragaret]: No, no. I’m okay. Deep breaths, Marge. I— I just feel like we failed him, you know? Like maybe if we’d been payin’ closer attention, we might’ve seen it. Might’ve caught it before it got so far out of hand. He was a talented boy. Loved to write poems.

[Producer]: Can you read us something he wrote?

[Margaret]: Sure. I’ve got his notebook right here. I always keep it on the side table, so’s I can feel close to him:

My sister ain’t smiled since the summer before high school.

Daddy says it’s ‘cause she knows I’m gonna die.

Mama cries—’cause he said it,

and maybe ‘cause he’s right.

But me?

I’m just sittin’ here wonderin’

how I’m gonna get high tonight.

___

[Donna]: Right there by that tree is where Alby overdosed. If you look close, you can see where I carved his initials into the bark. He loved these trees. Had since we were little. That’s why he took the job here and got himself into that whole mess. If he hadn’t loved ’em so much, maybe he’d still be alive.

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It was nearly 100 degrees outside in New York City, and I had no idea what I was doing at Madam Bovine’s Tarot & Vintage Tee Shop. Well, I did know why I was there, initially. With it being nearly 100 degrees and all, and me, being of the stocky type, I had sweat through my favorite Simpsons shirt—Homer, drinking a beer, with the words “trying is the first step toward failure.”

It was unlike me to leave my apartment without at least two backup shirt options, but I’d been in a rush that morning. Late, per usual, to meet my great aunt Eleanor for a sloe gin fizz down at McSorley’s.

Aunt Eleanor was known for her subtly. For instance, instead of saying “I’m old, and I’m racist,” she’d say things like, “What a sin. I can’t even understand the priests at Sunday Mass no more.” That graciousness never extended to me, however. If I showed up sweating like a pig on a spit, she’d call me a fat lard and tell me to stop drippin’ diabetes all over the nice white tablecloth.

Being a little late would result in the gentler insult, so I stopped in the first shop I saw on the way to grab a new shirt.

I opened the glass door and was met with a face full of metallic plastic beads. An ancient woman with pink hair and magnifying spectacles popped up from behind the counter in a very jack-in-the-box-like fashion.

“Come in, come in, Child,” she said, pulling at me telekinetically with her withered hands, her boney fingers. “Let Madam Bovine tell you you’re future.”

Now I hadn’t mentioned this before, but I am agreeable to a fault. I rarely say no, on account of I have this irrational fear that if I let someone down they will pull out a gun and shoot me dead. So instead, I said “okay” and followed her to a back room with a small round table and two folding chairs.

“Now tell Madam Bovine—” she shuffled the cards. “What question do you have?”

I wasn’t prepared for this, so I went with the one I was always asking myself: “will I ever be happy?”

“Mmmmm, that is a good one. Men who look like you ask me that one a lot.”

She flipped a card: THREE OF SWORDS.

“This is your past. Much heartbreak,” she cooed. “Much sadness. You have lost someone, yes?”

I nod my head. I had. I’d lost many.

“So sad. So, so sad. Poor man.”

“Erm, yes. What’s the next one?”

“Present.” She flips the FIVE OF CUPS.

“Oh, a sad man. Why you so sad? Why you regret so much?”

So much, I thought. I regretted everything. All of it. From being born, to stopping in this store, right up to making Aunt Eleanor wait for me.

I felt desperate for the next card. I leaned forward. “What about the future? What’s it say?”

She flipped over a card that looked more elaborate than the others: THE STAR.

Madam Bovine gasped. “Major arcana. The Star. Very, very good card.”

“What’s it mean?” I practically fell out of my seat, nearly breaking the cheap metal chair in two. “You gotta tell me, Madam Bovine. Please, you just gotta.”

She put her palm to her own heart. “I know things will get better for you, young man. You will be okay.”

I looked down at my bloated hands, tears falling in my lap. “Are you sure?”

“Sure? Of course I’m sure! I see all, I know all. Didn’t you read the sign?”

“My apologies,” I said, half-bowing as I stood.

I picked up the first t-shirt that caught my eye: another one, like mine, with Homer Simpson, a word bubble above his head: “You can’t keep blaming yourself. Blame yourself once, and then move on.”

Madam Bovine rang me up, charged me $95 for my reading and $45 for the shirt. Then she sent me on my way, toward McSorley’s, toward Aunt Eleanor. Toward somewhere better than all my yesterdays.

Mama always used hot rollers and wore nylons that came up over her belly to cover her stretch marks. She’d pull out the rollers, flip her head upside down, shake the curls, and make a big pile of fried bleach spaghetti—or maybe linguine, because the spirals were a little thicker than spaghetti. Then she’d put on the Barbie pink Wet N Wild lipstick, slip into her work clothes, and head to the Chinese restaurant down the street for her bartending shift.

Her life was glamorous, even though she’d often have a black eye or two, and even once, a neck brace. When she’d send my big brothers into the Pony Lounge to ask the bartender if our daddy was there, I’d think: how lucky am I to be on this adventure while all my friends are stuck in bed? One day, maybe I’ll get to go into that place and see what kind of ponies they got.

Sometimes I’d put my hair in hot rollers too. Then I’d grab the black tights that went with my Christmas dress and pull them up real high on my tummy. I’d sneak into mama’s bathroom, look in the mirror, slap myself in the face a few times, and run her Barbie pink Wet N Wild lipstick across my mouth. Because being her, even if sometimes she got black eyes or cried herself to sleep at night, was like being a movie star.

And when she started drinking? She was just like Marilyn Monroe.

There used to be a birch tree in the backyard. I peeled its skin and pretended the white curls of bark were movie tickets printed for me by an invisible teller, for an invisible movie I would watch with my invisible friends.

The toe of my sneaker knocks against its stump, a small reminder that the tree hadn’t been invisible, too.

Somebody is watching me from the window of my old room.

The new owners removed the PRINCESS CROSSING sticker that I’d pasted on the glass in fourth grade. I kept the blinds closed so my sister wouldn’t recognize it as the one she’d lost. She searched for a week before my parents bought her another.

For the first time ever, we had something in common.

Everyone I loved here is gone now, dead in ways that can’t be buried.

They know I’m here, the owners. I knocked on their door and said, “I’m writing a book.” They wouldn’t let me inside, but they said I could walk around the yard.

(I’m not really writing a book.)

I only wanted to hear their voices in the walls one last time.

The stump looks taller than it did a moment ago. Only a centimeter, maybe. I step back.

Beneath my sneaker, something shifts. I point at the stump and raise my finger.

The ground holds firm as I draw my finger higher, the weight of the past resisting the present.

The front door opens behind me.

Dirt crackles and splits as the roots flex beneath the ground. Its body wakes up, alive with the idea of a second chance. Branches fork upward like lightning and reach toward me, slipping down my throat and into my chest, detaching my heart and feeding it through the hollow trunk.

I can’t see who opened the door, but they see me.

They can tell you that I exist.

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Mary kneels down beside her brother Bernie’s casket and makes the sign of the cross, touching two fingers to her forehead, then her right shoulder, then the left. She runs her finger across the thick mahogany, checking for dust. There’s none, of course. It’s brand new.

Her sister kneels beside her.

“He looks good, doesn’t he?” Laura fixes his collar and pats his chest.

Mary scoffs. “Pfft! He better. For what I paid for that suit?”

“How much you pay?”

“Eight-hundred dollars!”

“Well, Mary,” Laura says in the most condescending older sibling voice she can muster, “why’d you go and do all that? It’s not like he’s going anywhere. And anyway, he looks God awful in blue.”

“I told the sales guy that my brother Bernie was dead and needed a suit. So he said I had to get him the nicest suit they had on account of I’d never get to buy him nothing again, for all my days.”

Laura shakes her head. “Mhm, yup. That’s how they get ya.”

Mary sighs. She kisses her brother’s forehead and leaves Laura to wipe away the pink lipstick mark.

As kids, Laura and Bernie always had a special bond. They were close in age—only a year apart—and loved to watch the Sox play in the summer, and the Celtics in the winter. Bernie didn’t care that she was a girl, even if their dad did.

When Bernie croaked last week, Laura was the one to jump into action. She had the casket chosen, mass booked, and flowers ordered before his body turned cold.

So, Mary wanted to do something right. It mattered that she chose the perfect suit—not only for Bernie, but for Laura too. She needed Laura to know that she could be her person. Not to replace their brother, but to prove that she was necessary, had been all along.

An impossible task, clearly. How could she ever have chosen something for Bernie when she never really knew him at all?

The only solace she has, she realizes, is that they would have inevitably picked the wrong outfit for her too.

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NOTE: “A ‘drabble’ is a short piece of fiction that is exactly 100 words in length.” -Wikipedia

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Sherri wanted to be everyone’s best friend. It often backfired.

For instance, she somehow managed to invite herself to the bowling alley for a co-worker’s 40^th birthday. Sherri choked on the final frame, throwing a gutter ball and blowing the game. She slung a 10-pound ball at the wall, earning a lifetime ban from Bowl-O-Mania.

“What a psycho,” said Jenny from accounting, the last thing Sherri heard before being escorted out.

Outside, she lit a cigarette and scrolled LinkedIn for a new job. Beside her, a pretty woman smoked alone, tapping ash onto the pavement. Sherri smiled and scooted closer.

Hi Friends!

I have had the best time building a community here on Substack. It’s made me (slightly) reconsider all my negative opinions on social media.

I don’t believe I’m at the point yet where my site deserves a significant influx of paid subscribers. However, I do feel like I should put this information somewhere so that people know what Ha Ha, Anyway has to offer.

Here are the benefits for free and paid subscribers:

Free subscriber benefits

-Daily flash & micro fiction stories

Paid subscriber benefits

Everything in the free subscriber tier, plus:

-Weekly flash & micro creative nonfiction stories

-Exclusive course materials from my Reading & Writing Fiction course

-Immediate follow back

Founding member benefits

Everything in the paid subscriber tier, plus:

-Personalized feedback on one of your stories (up to ten pages)

Also, for the month of July, I’m running a Christmas in July special! All paid subscribers receive 20% off.

I hope you’ve been enjoying my work so far!

<3 Amanda

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Katie was a tangle of messy brown hair and limbs. She’d spent her summer perfecting her handstands, using the edges of the blue sectional to spot her. She still had all the time in the world to get going on her gymnastics career. In four years’ time she’d be fifteen, the perfect age for an Olympian. Once she got her handstands, she’d begin work on the cartwheels.

The lucky thing for Katie was that her parents were hardly ever home, so she had the living room all to herself. She thought she’d use the open space on the hardwood floor to come up with a floor routine, just as soon as she figured out what a floor routine entailed.

Rocket Power ended, and the CatDog theme song flooded through her open windows and out into dusk.

“One fine day with a woof and a purr/a baby was born and it caused a little stir”

Katie believed CatDog was her spirit animal. Her parents were pretty confused when she was born too on account of her dad had elected to have a vasectomy before her parents, well, you know—did, that. To make her.

Was it bowling league night? Or maybe it was dinner with their friends from bowling league? Katie couldn’t keep up with her parents’ busy schedule. One thing she did know for sure, however, was that she’d save them a seat, front row, at her Olympic debut. Wherever that was, so long as it wasn’t somewhere too cold, like Antarctica. Which it couldn’t be, on account of her Social Studies teacher once said people don’t actually live there, thank God for that. So, there was a seriously good chance her parents might show up if she were a contender for a gold medal at the very prestigious Winter Olympic Games.

She’d show them. She’d put in the work. Right after this episode of her favorite show.

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There was a daddy long legs living below the bottom shelf of the closet in our Ninja Turtle playroom. I’m not sure of his given name, but I called him Daddy.

Daddy fascinated me. It was before I’d been to summer camp, and I’d only ever known East Boston. You didn’t see fellas like that ‘round those parts often—tall, dark, bulbous. I’d open the closet, lie on my back, and push myself underneath the shelf like a mechanic. We’d spend all day together, shooting the breeze. He didn’t have much to say, but he was an awfully good listener. I liked that. As the youngest, everyone always told me what to do. Daddy never did. And it felt like he really got it, you know?

Like, he understood why I tried to stab Kev with a butter knife, why I’d licked Tre’s chicken cutlet before she put it on her plate. He understood that revenge was the only way I could feel better after they told me I was adopted, after they said I had no friends. Daddy was proof that they were wrong about me. Here I was with my best friend on the planet. Idiots.

I opened the cupboard one morning to find some breakfast. There was a box of Trix, which was pretty weird because Ma only bought Shaws brand anything, ever. I couldn’t wait to show Daddy, maybe even gift him a carpenter ant mashed onto a grape-flavored piece of name-brand cereal. But something was off about my friend that day. His legs were curled into his body, like he’d been freeze-dried. I knew immediately; I was no stranger to death.

It was only one week prior that we’d buried my caterpillar—Cat—in the yard, two white plastic knives in the shape of the cross jutting from the earth.

I took a deep breath, nodded, and said a solemn good-bye to my friend. I did not bury him like Cat. I let him rest where he’d been happiest, the ghost of me, my high-pitched voice, echoing against the wooden shelves for eternity. He’d like that. He’d like that a lot.

Then I closed the door and headed into the backyard, in search of someone new—perhaps a kind, gentle ladybug to fill the silence, the small hole in my heart.

I stare down into the Styrofoam cup.

Six black legs flail in the water. The ant looks up at me, a hero. Protector of man and bug. The only seven-year-old on the planet with the strength, the power, to pull him from the rapid current.

He’s choking on hose water, gasping for air. Underneath the panic, however, is a calm resolve. Because he knows I’m there. He knows I have the courage to plunge my pointer finger into the depths of the great sea and pluck him from his mortal fate.

Which I do.

And then, I drown him again.

My father overdosed the winter prior. I watched through the stair posts as his legs pulsed in the bathroom doorway each time the EMT pumped him full of electricity. Ten minutes later, he was walking again.

Not on my watch, I think, as the movement in the cup slows for the third time and the life fades from the ant’s frail, helpless body. I empty the cup into my hand and cradle him in the crevice of my life line.

Nobody dies, so long as I’m there, watching.

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Do you remember the time you picked me up and brought me to watch two high school girls maul each other behind Luigi’s Pizza?

White girls. Thick. One with fingers clad in fake silver rings. They wore Ecko sweatshirts, pajama pants, shell toes. Rubber bracelets, hair tied in messy buns. The girl with the rings removed her hoops.

It smelled like cigarettes and cold sweat.

Do you remember putting me on your shoulders so I could see over the ocean of teenagers, practically giants, gathered in one breathing knot, waiting to find out who’d bleed first? My nose stung from the cold, and I laughed. So, you laughed too.

Your baby sister, a little bad ass, cool enough and trustworthy enough to watch a fight and not tell mom and dad.

Do you remember asking me to choose? Which one? And I picked the one with brown hair because I too had brown hair. So, you took the blonde and we placed our bets with Baby Bottle Pops and Pokemon cards.

I remember thinking this is what it feels like to be alive. Because I was—

—And you were, too.

And the girl with the brown hair was also the one with all the rings so the odds were in my favor.

Do you remember, just before the fight started, your friend—I think his name was Cheezy, and I know that he’s dead now—dapped you up and said is this your little sister, man? And you said yeah. You told him this was my first fight. And your friend, like me, thought that was pretty dope.

Do you remember how brutal it was? How your fighter’s nose exploded with blood. How clumps of hair tumbled over the black pavement like an urban Wild West. It was fireworks. It was streamers. It was so—

I thought: fuck

I thought: that’s a bad word

I thought: I don’t care.

Do you remember that I won the bet?

Do you? Or did Darwin get it right, and I’m the only one left with this?

Everyone is here to see the Mummy of Marirtyef.

The placard tells me she’s a woman. 50s. Intermediate period, 2100-2040 BC. Excavated in 1912 by Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition.

The same year the Titanic sank, I think. Because Hollywood did that one. Because Leonardo DiCaprio stole my nine-year-old heart and Rose DeWitt Bukater inspired my prom hairstyle.

A little boy grips his father’s hand and demands he look at her blue faience beads.

“Ain’t that somethin’?” the dad says, with tentative disinterest. Unsure of how much energy he wants to channel into her existence in the 20 seconds or so that he examines the silhouette of her body, plastered in linen and four-thousand-year-old grime.

They move along with the flow of the crowd. One person, then the next, as I remain planted in front of the glass casing.

It must be odd to be made a spectacle of by strangers. To be ogled by little boys and parents with things like 401ks because what’s that to a mummy anyway? Wouldn’t she want them to know how she lived her life?

Do they know anything of her beyond this placard? Whether she bathed her children in the Nile, or believed dreams were portals to the supernatural, or felt most herself spinning flax into thread before weaving it into linen for her family’s clothing?

And did they know you listened to “Hips Don’t Lie” on repeat after dad left us for another woman, your best Shakira impersonation seeping through the creases in my door on a Sunday morning? Your voice and sunshine: two mortal enemies to my teenage sleep schedule.

Did they see it when you’d pull my whole body into your lap and coo there, there, patting my back with your open palm? Raking your unpolished fingernails against my scalp until I fell asleep and all was well. Three or twenty-three—my age didn’t matter.

And when they shook my hand and said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” did they understand the weight of it? That I was forever changed and my walking encyclopedia, my temple of knowledge, was swallowed by the thickness of time.

A college student bumps into me, spilling cold coffee down my brand-new white blouse. It slicks my mother’s blue beads, the ones she chose not to take with her.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, not sure what to do with her hands. Wanting to fix it, but too modest to touch my breasts.

I point to the sign above the entryway: NO FOOD OR BEVERAGE.

She looks at it, then at me, her mouth opening and closing around another apology.

Then she is gone too, absorbed into the soft, shuffling procession of the living.