Photo by Bradley Allweil on Unsplash
by Jenny Stalter
Mom says love is the most powerful thing on earth, and that’s how she’ll quit drinking, which is called self-love, and that’s how she found me a new dad, and we’ll finally be a real family. I don’t tell her I can read minds. Mom says too much TV can rot your brain, so I don’t tell her when she’s drunk her brain sounds rotten like that time she stopped cooking for so long the bag of potatoes melted into brown water with maggots squirming all over, and I don’t tell her I know why all I got for my birthday was pants from the church drive so small they pinched tight around the middle because her bottles and cigarettes cost us her whole paycheck. Mom says if you look up at night and see a shooting star that means you can make a wish and it will come true, so I don’t tell her I know she doesn’t really believe that, and I don’t tell her when she forgot to feed me, I found a can of Dr Pepper, which filled up my tummy because of the bubbles but then I could smell Shirley frying chicken over in the next trailer and it smelled so good it made the bubbles not really do much like when she said to eat all my vegetables so I can grow big and strong and handed me a can of unopened green beans. Mom says family is the second most important thing after love, so I don’t tell her what my new dad thinks about when he’s always looking at me. Mom doesn’t know about superpowers, so maybe she doesn’t know about shooting stars either, so next time I see one, I’m going to make a wish for her.
Jenny Stalter is a writer and former private chef. Her work was selected for Best Small Fictions 2024, and she was a recipient of the 2023 Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellowship. Her fiction appears in Longleaf Review, Moon City Review, Citron Review, Cease, Cows, Ghost Parachute, and other publications. She has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Best American Short Stories.
