Janna Tierney
Mother’ s Story
Janna Tierney
T he glint of an under-cabinet task light caught her watch crystal as she chopped carrots for the pot roast. Her head turned upward in spite of her task-centered drive to finish dinner before 4:15. In spite of herself, she watched the bright, oval spot of light flit around the kitchen ceiling, the miniscule motions of her wrist animating the imaginary pixie just like her mother used to do, to entertain and bewilder her and her brother when they were young and hadn’ t a quarter for the cinema. Then, her mother— may she rest in peace— would make up fairy stories punctuated by the inexplicable magic of a fairy that would dance about the ceiling when the morning light hit the kitchen window and refracted off her mother’ s wristwatch just so: stories so enticing that when the specter appeared, she could almost hear a little bell voice whispering behind her ear, come away, come away.
Abby had been lying on her stomach for twenty minutes, propped up with her chin in her left hand and a purple marker in her right. Her left arm was asleep and the elbow was firmly imprinted with the texture of her bedroom carpet. She ran her finger along a line of neat purple writing on her beautiful masterpiece: a book with twelve pages, made of six folded pages of borrowed printer paper and a cover of green construction paper, stapled together twice in the center. Mom would love her Christmas present so much that she would insist that she write more— and one day Abby would become a great author, read aloud after dinner and discarded in thrift stores. The true mark of success in authorship: three copies of your novel, the spine broken in twenty vertical creases and a Coming Soon cover for the Warner Bros. film, present in every thrift and used book store for 69 ¢ per paperback. She turned the completed page, pressed it down, and began writing the next sentence.
“ Mom, how do you spell carry?” she called and waited for the half second while the sound waves flittered out her bedroom door, around
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