My birth mom can’t meet me at the airport, but if I Uber to Bank of America she’ll be out front in a puffy winter coat. The crocuses are open.
I only recognize her eyes—same as mine. I stand at the window of her SUV and listen. She needs money. She won’t ask outright. I can manage thirty dollars. “Let me look at you,” she says. “Yeah, you’re mine,” she laughs, “oh my god you are.”
“There’s a coffee place near where I live,” she says. She’s not allowed in, but I could buy us some and come on over.
“You broke off with your parents?” she asks.
“Well, fuck them,” she says.
She has a room and closet space in an outbuilding behind the shop. A space heater ticks at the head of a floor mattress. On the windowsill are pictures of nobody I recognize, except for the eyes. To see them, she has to lie on her left side, which slows the heart, they say.
The window looks onto the dumpster. Every night, she tells me, they throw out the bread they don’t sell, so she sits low by the window and points the tip of her head, her nose and eyes basically, over the sill, just ‘til the car lights turn and pass into the trees. Technically it has to go in the dumpster, all that bread, but they wrap it in plastic and drive off quick so she won’t feel watched. “Almost never use my hot plate,” she says. “It’s a gold rush every night.”
She asks how long I can stay, but neither of us know.
Besides the photos, there’s only a pottery cherub, what they call a bisque figure, crossing its plump legs on a shelf by her mattress. A sailor suit hangs on the wall, absolutely clean. It’s so tiny the cherub could put it on. As if to bless the bed it faces, the arms are spread, tacked to the plaster. She beams when I notice.
“Oh, you won’t believe who wore this,” she says.
She rushes to untack it, then holds it out for me.
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Addison Zeller lives in Wooster, Ohio, and edits fiction for The Dodge. His work appears in 3:AM, Cincinnati Review, minor literature[s], HAD, hex, and elsewhere.
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image: Natalie Nee is a novelist, former ghostwriter, and latte enthusiast. Natalie’s short story, “Saudade”, was selected as one of Across the Margin’s Best Of stories published in 2023. Her work has been published by Roi Fainéant Press, tiny wren lit, Half and One, Epistemic Literary, and more. She’s cooler on Twitter (@novelnatalie). Content warning: alluding to domestic violence (Horticulture).
Rejection Letters 