The monsoon our mother delivers a boy, we’re saved from our father’s anger. Our hands are raw, unrecognizable, carrying hot water, tugging clean sheets beneath our mother’s heels, taut like our names. The baby looks whittled out of a…
I was ten when I discovered I had a womb. It bloomed red. The same year I learned about space. Booster rockets to escape gravity, separated and lost forever. My mother bagged items in a grocery store, Mary, an…
I have always been intrigued by the idea of motherhood—how a mother and a child are born at the same moment and how different and yet convergent their lives turn out to be. A rebellious daughter finds her mother simpleminded and feels she would never be a mother herself, and yet, after her mother’s death, she follows the footsteps into marriage and motherhood. Writing this piece in first-person point of view felt intimate—a voice with full access into itself. First person is a heavily subjective perspective, not an objective, wholesome reality. It brings out the characters, like the narrator and her mother, like me, as we discover how we think our children belong to us, when, in fact, we belong to them.
TARA ISABEL ZAMBRANO is a writer of color and the author of Death, Desire, and Other Destinations, a full-length flash collection by Okay Donkey Press. Her work has won the first prize in The Southampton Review Short Short Fiction Prize 2019, a second prize in Bath Flash Fiction Award 2020, and been a finalist in Bat City Review Short Prose Contest 2018 and Mid-American Review Fineline Competition 2018. She lives in Texas and is the Fiction Editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.
