I’m just sitting down to write when my mother descends out of a Winston-blue cloud, nosy-necked, squinting. Her head glints with bobby pins, skinned-tight and sectioned, mapped out like a city block, an argument for redlining, a gerrymander, aspirational,…
On several recent mornings I have awakened gasping, jarred from a dream I mostly can’t remember but that has left me in a state of panic. I’m guessing this is a symptom of sleep apnea and not a regression to the worst days of my mental illness, but honestly, who knows?
This story rose from the ashes of a few of those uncomfortable instances.
One way I keep myself safe when I write is to insist that the piece is fiction. Poetry. I do not strive to relate a story as it really happened. Chances are it never really happened—it just happened to me, which makes it the god’s honest truth.
Word choice is important. The five senses hew as close to experience as possible: Did it feel blonde? Smell naked? Did anyone yellow, grind, or metaphor in the making of this story? If so, I say so.
The truth, of course, is that my mother is a bird and my father is a sculpture and I dare anybody to assert otherwise. If you do, you are also correct. We are all exactly as we perceive one another: easy marks, wormy corpses, talking statuary.
Though we can change. We get older, sober. Go to therapy. Mother’s threats and gaslighting don’t inspire the desired effect anymore. We become less confused, less easy to manipulate—which is when things become really dangerous, though nothing is as ominous or unpredictable as our tormentors would like us to believe. They aren’t that imaginative. They are, however, absolutely as ruthless and vicious as we always, in our secret hearts, knew them to be, no matter how we tried to delude ourselves. They will hurt us—they are happy to. And then they will discard us.
Not that I have ever experienced anything like this in real life. I write fiction. Poetry. Nothing that could or should be construed as reality—
“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.”
—Puck, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare
…and that, of course, is the god’s honest truth.
JENNIFER MALONEY writes poetry and fiction. Find her work in Ninth Letter, Many Nice Donkeys, Synkroniciti Magazine and many other publications. Recent chapbooks include Maps of a World (Raw Earth Ink, 2025) and Red (Clare Songbirds Publishing, forthcoming 2026). Jennifer is a parent, a partner, and a very lucky friend, and she is grateful, for all of it, every day.
