Short Fiction
unfamiliar, pointed and harsh. Her mother was wearing shoes and the sound echoed through the silence Anne had spent almost a year cultivating in the house. Her mother arrived in the TV room wearing a burgundy linen skirt and a black cashmere sweater. She’d even taken the pains to slip her legs into nylons and neat black shoes. “Stop staring at me,” she said. Anne angled her face back toward the TV. Her mother sat down on the couch and smoothed her skirt the way she’d done since Anne was a young girl. Her breathing was labored and Anne realized she’d struggled to get dressed. “You look lovely,” Anne said. “That’s not the point.” Her mother’s voice was nearly vicious. Silence stretched between them until she said, “But thank you.” Later, after a film they watched in a stifled silence, after her mother had gone to bed, Anne saw the pair of nylons cut into pieces and tangled in a flesh colored heap at the bottom of the bathroom wastebasket. The three original customers do not move while Anne is in the diner. They do not talk to one another. Anne reads several newspapers, smokes too many cigarettes, drinks coffee, eats another piece of apricot pie, eavesdrops on two truck drivers, and watches the waitress wash her face in a sink by the kitchen. She reads one of the newspapers again and almost forgets her mother on the table when she finally gets up to pay and leave. 5:30. Anne returns to the safe cocoon of the car. The deep blue night and the rural road make it difficult to see ahead. She drives slowly, well below the speed limit. She considers a series of confessions she had promised herself she would tell her mother when the time came, untruths and omissions which needed to be corrected if they were going to part company on equal footing: how she’d cheated on several tests in high school, how she’d never liked her Aunt Cynthia, her father’s sister, and that she knew her mother had hated the woman too but had never dared to admit it, how she’d always taken her father’s side in arguments even if secretly she knew her mother had often been right. Anne looks into the rearview mirror, expecting to meet her mother’s watery eyes. And then she realizes—for the last two years Anne’s mother refused to ride in the front seat, claiming it was unsafe and that she felt confined. Anne has placed her mother’s urn in the back seat out of habit and this is actually quite funny.
Atticus Review│Get Lit: Round 1
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