The Taste of Olives
I watched Mom from across the room, my stomach in knots. Memories of her criticizing my college major and my tiny apartment with its cold concrete floors remained.
She hovered near the appetizers at my brother's birthday party. I walked over and froze. Mom popped an olive into her mouth and smiled.
"Mom?"
She looked up. "Yes, Stacy?"
"You just… ate an olive."
She scarfed down another. "Delicious, aren't they?"
I shook my head. Her hatred of olives had been seared into my childhood.
“Mom, you hate olives.”
Her hand stopped midair. “Do I?” she asked, voice shaky.
Silence thickened.
Her bottom lip quivered.
I stood beside her, twisting my napkin. "Mom, are you okay?"
Child-like fright washed over her, the same look I'd worn years ago. "I don't know," she whispered.
I stepped forward to comfort her, then bristled remembering every criticism she'd delivered.
“It’s okay. We’ll figure this out together.” Her look of confusion melted into relief. She squeezed my hand, something she hadn’t done in years.
Over the next two weeks I worried more. She misplaced her phone several times, called my brother our late father's name, and repeated the same story twice in one dinner.
At the clinic, the neurologist confirmed my growing dread: early-stage dementia.
Tears slid down my cheeks.
Stunned and afraid, I informed my siblings, and we made a plan.
I taped a whiteboard to her kitchen wall. I wrote everyone’s names, and started assigning pieces of her life—doctor’s appointments to my brother, groceries to my sister, daily check-ins and bills to me—because caring for her had become too much for only one of us.
My brother sighed when I asked him to take over her doctor appointments.
“I can’t always leave work,” he said.
"Neither can I," I snapped. "But somebody has to. If you schedule them, we can rotate taking her.”
My sister stared at the ground before finally agreeing to get her groceries.
Outside, the neighbor's dog began to bark, filling the awkward silence.
Even after delegating tasks, my phone still rang first when something went wrong. How was I the one left carrying the load?
The following week, Mom stood in the kitchen, staring at her pill organizer.
"Tuesday?"
“It’s Thursday,” I said gently, pointing to the oversized calendar.
She frowned, "Good thing you're here to babysit me."
At Sunday dinner, my brother scheduled her upcoming appointments onto her phone, while my sister promised to go grocery shopping for her.
Mom looked at us. “I don’t know what I’d do without you all.”
I shifted uncomfortably. Gratitude hadn't been Mom's strong suit.
She reached for another olive. “Can you believe I spent years hating these?”
“You spent years making the rest of us hate them too,” I said.
My siblings chuckled, but Mom didn't laugh. She kept staring at the small, dark fruit in her hand.
I remembered the woman who'd found fault with all my choices.
As Mom turned the olive between her fingers, searching for a memory that wasn't there, I realized I'd give anything to argue with that woman one more time.
Barb DeMoney is a writer whose work spans romance, horror, comedy, thriller, and mystery. Her stories have appeared in Micromance Magazine, Flash Phantoms, Lunch Ticket, Rat Bag Lit, and Sudden Flash among others. When not writing, Barb enjoys hiking, yoga, reading, concerts, and spending time with her family and dogs.
Anna
The River Oder forms a natural border between Poland and Germany as it travels north towards the Baltic Sea. If you follow the river south, however, you will eventually reach the town of Borzirac, where I found myself in the late summer of 2015. I had been hired to teach English at a private school and it was there that I met Anna. She was in her late sixties, and through her smile she gave the impression of someone who had a lot of secrets. Over the course of our lessons together, she revealed to me that her mother had died recently and she had never known her father. During what was to be our last meeting, she started telling me about the village where her mother grew up during the Second World War.
“Everybody was afraid of them,” Anna said.
The next thing I know, I'm standing in a forest surrounded by soldiers.
“Don't worry,” a muffled voice says – I'm not sure if it's Anna's. “Nobody can see you.”
One man points his rifle in my direction, as if sensing my presence. Another soldier says something in Russian and the men, all in green uniforms, creep towards the edge of the forest. I follow them out into a clearing where I see a small house with a steep sloping roof.
“My grandmother's house,” says the voice. “Quickly!”
The front door is ajar. Inside, the light from an open fire fills the room. A girl is sitting at a table and weeping.
“What's the matter?” says a woman approaching.
“I don't want to wear these clothes,” the girl says. She is dressed like an old woman, even though she looks about twelve years old.
“If you don't wear these clothes, the soldiers will hurt you.”
There is fear and anger in the woman's voice. She pulls a red silk scarf over the girl's head, then fetches a walking stick from the other side of the room.
“Now, walk like I showed you.”
The girl, stooping slightly, takes hold of the walking stick and shuffles forward on the creaking floorboards.
“Good, but remember to keep your head down so that the soldiers cannot see your face.”
“Enough,” said Anna.
I was back in the classroom, feeling as though I had awoken from a dream.
“What just happened?” I asked, but Anna was already at the door. As she turned to say goodbye, I noticed something red in her hand. A scarf.
That evening, walking home along the bank of the river, I stopped at the Russian Army monument, discreetly placed behind some trees. It was impossible to tell the heroes from the villains among all the names of soldiers killed in the Upper Silesian offensive of 1945. The only thing I was certain of at that moment was the mighty rush of water beside me.
A native of north-west England, John has been writing poetry and prose for a good few years now. He also teaches English as a foreign language.
Hanged by a Hair or A Murder Mystery Minimised
This story was originally published in 1916.
The mystery had now reached its climax. First, the man had been undoubtedly murdered. Secondly, it was absolutely certain that no conceivable person had done it.
It was therefore time to call in the great detective.
He gave one searching glance at the corpse. In a moment he whipped out a microscope.
"Ha! ha!" he said, as he picked a hair off the lapel of the dead man's coat. "The mystery is now solved."
He held up the hair.
"Listen," he said, "we have only to find the man who lost this hair and the criminal is in our hands."
The inexorable chain of logic was complete.
The detective set himself to the search.
For four days and nights he moved, unobserved, through the streets of New York scanning closely every face he passed, looking for a man who had lost a hair.
On the fifth day he discovered a man, disguised as a tourist, his head enveloped in a steamer cap that reached below his ears. The man was about to go on board the Gloritania.
The detective followed him on board.
"Arrest him!" he said, and then drawing himself to his full height, he brandished aloft the hair.
"This is his," said the great detective. "It proves his guilt."
"Remove his hat," said the ship's captain sternly.
They did so.
The man was entirely bald.
"Ha!" said the great detective without a moment of hesitation. "He has committed not one murder but about a million."
Stephen Leacock (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humourist. From 1915 to 1925, he was the best-known English-speaking humourist in the world. (Biography borrowed from Wikipedia)
Death Omens in Unwashed Feathers
A single black feather falls into a muddy puddle as I walk down the sidewalk. I tell my babushka-clad grandmother when I get to her place. She’s trained me to see omens in everything. Homeschool for the superstitious.
“You’ll die in a flood,” she squawks from the couch.
I laugh and pat her head. She flicks me off with a gnarled finger. To get her back, when I go, I leave the TV on the good news, and I leave the remote on the other side of the room.
On the way home, dark pimples of clouds fester on the horizon. I roll sunglass-covered eyes at a crow perched on a swinging traffic light. Death omens be damned, it’s nice out.
Still, my heartbeat drums as rain begins to pound the windshield. Hands shaking, wipers flapping, I pull into a parking lot to be safe. I’m still laughing at my silliness when the deluge comes roaring around the strip mall. The engine stalls when the water hits. Panic rips through me as I scrabble for the door.
I picture my grandmother sitting on her couch. She’s going to tell me I told you so.
Julia Rajagopalan is a writer of speculative and literary fiction who lives just outside of Detroit. She's a member of the SFWA and the HWA. To read more of her stories, check out her website: http://JuliaRajagopalan.com.
Whiteout
Kelsey had been ready to end things with Travis, but he surprised her by renting a cozy cabin for Valentine’s Day. Dumb as bricks, but sweet as pie, he deserved a shot at recapturing their spark.
Flurries bedazzled the scenic drive up, and despite poor reception, they managed to find the snow-crusted cabin and beat the nasty forecast. But Kelsey cringed at ribbons of gold honeycomb stretched from the porch ceiling, against the doorframe. “When’s the last time anyone’s been here?”
“It’s okay, babe. It’s winter. They’re dead.” Before she could stop him, Travis ripped the hive from the wall and lifted it like a trophy. A swarm of brown bees emerged, zigzagging through the air. Travis shouted, dropped the hive, and swatted. More bees stirred from hibernation.
They raced to the car. Red welts bloomed on Travis’s handsome face. His breathing grew labored. Snow fell harder.
Kelsey took the wheel and zoomed down the slick forest road.
“I’ll be OK,” Travis insisted.
“You’re having an allergic reaction. We’re going to a hospital.”
Travis wheezed and reached with weak fingers, but Kelsey focused on the road, white-knuckled, heart pounding. The blizzard whorled as they reached the interstate.
Travis’s breaths hissed. One eye swelled shut. He rasped, “Love you.”
The car fishtailed, but Kelsey kept control. She finally got a signal, twenty minutes from the nearest emergency room. Keep going, she thought. I’ll get there faster than an ambulance in these conditions.
The road hazed, ghostly and blank. She reduced speed as wind whipped the car. Twenty minutes became twenty-five, then thirty. She tried 911, but the call dropped. The map errored out. The horizon vanished into swirling white. Visibility surrendered to absolute zero. Travis’s good eye glazed.
“Stay with me.” She skidded past the blinking hazards of stranded cars.
She flashed back to their first date. He’d worn a tie to impress her. Told her she was smart. Since then, she’d said too many times that he wasn’t smart—he doomscrolled, invested in pyramid schemes—disturbed a fucking beehive!
But Travis was sweeter than honey. He sobbed when her cat died. Drove his grandma to church on Sundays. Clutched Kelsey’s hand during scary movies. Delighted her with special dinners and charming getaways.
Tears blurred Kelsey’s vision. The wipers swatted globs of unending snow. She could no longer hear his breaths but didn’t dare take her eyes off the foggy nothingness.
Vertigo soured her stomach.
Her ears rang to the rhythm of swishing wipers.
She didn’t care about the spark anymore.
She just wanted to see beyond the endless white.
They slid off road and crunched into a snowbank. A sparkling blanket pressed against the windshield. Wheels spun uselessly.
Travis lay breathless, disfigured and alien. His mouth gaped. His eye rolled back in the socket. From the collar of his shirt, a fat queen bee crawled. Antennae twitching. Wings flickering. Stinger sliding from her swollen abdomen.
The queen scrambled in circles. Desperately alone. Directionless.
Kelsey’s heart shuddered. Her vision frosted over.
Kevin M. Folliard hails from the western suburbs of Chicago, IL. He enjoys his day job in academia and membership in the La Grange Writers Group. You can find more of his horror writing in his anthology The Misery King’s Country and by visiting www.KevinFolliard.com.
And in the End
Ryan’s first real job was bussing tables for the lunchtime shift at Denny’s the summer of 1977, before his senior year of high school. The shift manager was a woman named Alice. In her late thirties, Alice appeared quite old to teenaged Ryan, but he liked her because she wasn’t bossy and had a remarkable talent for making dirty jokes seem funnier than they really were.
One morning in August, Ryan clocked in a few minutes early and got himself a cup of coffee. He was standing next to the urn thinking about a second cup when Alice arrived, pale and red-eyed. She looked like someone had just died, and it turned out someone had just died, because she announced, “Elvis is dead” in a throbbing voice and began to sob. A mascara-tinted tear trickled down one cheek.
Ryan had to turn away quickly so she wouldn’t see he was trying not to laugh, not because he thought Elvis dying was funny—he didn’t—but because it was the first time he had seen someone emotionally affected by the life (or death) of a celebrity, and it just struck him as absurd. He wouldn’t realize until years later that what to him was the unsurprising demise of a washed-up, overweight lounge singer was to Alice the downfall of a hero, a crushing blow to her adolescent fantasies, forever tainting memories of high school dances, her first kiss, and visions of what life could be. It was a bereavement he would finally share the night he sat bug-eyed, frozen in front of the TV that was saying John Lennon was dead.
R.K. West is a former travel blogger who sold everything, spent two years on the road, and now lives next to the mighty Columbia River.
Up in the Gallery
Translation by Ian Johnston
This was originally published in 1919.
If some frail tubercular lady circus rider were to be driven in circles around and around the arena for months and months without interruption in front of a tireless public on a swaying horse by a merciless whip-wielding master of ceremonies, spinning on the horse, throwing kisses and swaying at the waist, and if this performance, amid the incessant roar of the orchestra and the ventilators, were to continue into the ever-expanding, gray future, accompanied by applause, which died down and then swelled up again, from hands which were really steam hammers, perhaps then a young visitor to the gallery might rush down the long stair case through all the levels, burst into the ring, and cry “Stop!” through the fanfares of the constantly adjusting orchestra.
But since things are not like that—since a beautiful woman, in white and red, flies in through curtains which proud men in livery open in front of her, since the director, devotedly seeking her eyes, breathes in her direction, behaving like an animal, and, as a precaution, lifts her up on the dapple-gray horse, as if she were his grand daughter, the one he loved more than anything else, as she starts a dangerous journey, but he cannot decide to give the signal with his whip and finally, controlling himself, gives it a crack, runs right beside the horse with his mouth open, follows the rider’s leaps with a sharp gaze, hardly capable of comprehending her skill, tries to warn her by calling out in English, furiously castigating the grooms holding hoops, telling them to pay the most scrupulous attention, and begs the orchestra, with upraised arms, to be quiet before the great jump, finally lifts the small woman down from the trembling horse, kisses her on both cheeks, considers no public tribute adequate, while she herself, leaning on him, high on the tips of her toes, with dust swirling around her, arms outstretched and head thrown back, wants to share her luck with the entire circus—since this is how things are, the visitor to the gallery puts his face on the railing and, sinking into the final march as if into a difficult dream, weeps, without realizing it.
Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924) was a German-language Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his work typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe situations like those depicted in his writings. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926). His work has widely influenced artists, philosophers, composers, filmmakers, literary historians, religious scholars, cultural theorists.
Worse Than a Baby’s Cry
It comes again, this time right in our ears. He caught the snake the other day but made me pinky promise not to tell. He never showed me the frog though. Its back leg now halfway down the snake’s throat. And he never showed our mother much of anything; he knew the answer was always no. There was something about my brother she never could get the hang of.
That’s just how it is. She doesn’t waste any time thinking about it, she just picks up the glass tank and walks straight to the front door. The tank goes on its side, spilling out the frog so the dark dewed grass can safely take it. I stand with my brother, heavy in the doorway. The same doorway that will hold only my brother a few years later, when my mother leaves, taking just me, assuring all of us that a boy needs his father.
It’s almost quiet now. Crickets softly chant, as if they know better. My mother kneels in the darkness beside the tank. The snake doesn’t hurry. It slowly creeps out and coils itself beside her. Like it was hers to keep all along.
Colleen Albano is based in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, where she works in educational assessment. She holds an MA in TESOL and has taught writing to English-language learners at a local community college. She spends too much time sewing and serenading her cat, Otto.
Doctor Chevalier's Lie
This was originally published in 1893.
The quick report of a pistol rang through the quiet autumn night. It was no unusual sound in the unsavory quarter where Dr. Chevalier had his office. Screams commonly went with it. This time there had been none.
Midnight had already rung in the old cathedral tower.
The doctor closed the book over which he had lingered so late, and awaited the summons that was almost sure to come.
As he entered the house to which he had been called he could not but note the ghastly sameness of detail that accompanied these oft-recurring events. The same scurrying; the same groups of tawdry, frightened women bending over banisters--hysterical, some of them; morbidly curious, others; and not a few shedding womanly tears; with a dead girl stretched somewhere, as this one was.
And yet it was not the same. Certainly she was dead: there was the hole in the temple where she had sent the bullet through. Yet it was different. Other such faces had been unfamiliar to him, except so far as they bore the common stamp of death. This one was not.
Like a flash he saw it again amid other surroundings. The time was little more than a year ago. The place, a homely cabin down in Arkansas, in which he and a friend had found shelter and hospitality during a hunting expedition. There were others beside. A little sister or two; a father and mother--coarse, and bent with toil, but proud as archangels of their handsome girl, who was too clever to stay in an Arkansas cabin, and who was going away to seek her fortune in the big city.
"The girl is dead," said Doctor Chevalier. "I knew her well, and charge myself with her remains and decent burial." The following day he wrote a letter. One, doubtless, to carry sorrow, but no shame to the cabin down there in the forest.
It told that the girl had sickened and died. A lock of hair was sent and other trifles with it. Tender last words were even invented.
Of course it was noised about that Doctor Chevalier had cared for the remains of a woman of doubtful repute. Shoulders were shrugged. Society thought of cutting him. Society did not, for some reason or other, so the affair blew over.
Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was an American author of short stories and novels, best known today for her 1899 novel The Awakening. Her works were often criticized as controversial or immoral, and she did not have financial success with her writing, but after her death she was recognized as a leading writer of her time.
Fierce Blue
The World Trade Towers held the sunset’s reflection when it was time to leave work. Crowds departed though revolving doors, pushing their way to subways and buses.
The closest window to Diana’s desk looked out over the Hudson when she worked on the 50th floor. Close to the shoreline, the water was a dark and forceful blue. The view was like a postcard.
Monica, Diana’s boss, stayed late when the team did, having pizza delivered though a labyrinth of hallways. Her reedy voice and ready smile convinced Diana and her co-workers to do any amount of work she asked for. She stood by each of them in turn, tall and svelte with short blonde hair.
Something about the building was disquieting, especially at night. The sheer magnitude. The stark white tile in the ladies’ room leaked a hygienic deadliness.
Once, Diana rode up in a blue-lined elevator with a toddler and his mother. As soon as they started moving, the boy wouldn’t stop screaming. If Diana had not been a civilized adult, she would have joined in. The vastness of the place flummoxed almost everyone.
Eventually, Diana resigned to take a job in midtown. The pre-war office building was tiny compared to the towers. On that clear day in September more than ten years later, the towers disintegrated in a cloud of smoke that filled the sky. Until that day, Diana could see them when she looked down the avenue where she and her toddler son lived.
Dust rained down on lower Manhattan and settled over everything. When Diana took her boy out in his stroller, she tied blue bandannas around his mouth and hers for protection. On the way to the supermarket, he’d torn off his bandanna and started crying because he had no words for the scorched odor that was everywhere. Afterwards, Diana sat with him on the couch and told him a story that he could not yet understand.
Elizabeth B. Morse won first prize for flash fiction in Cardinal Sins. Her poetry collection, Unreasonable Weather, published by Kelsay Books, was a finalist in poetry for the 2026 International Book Awards. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The Flying Machine
This story was written before 1914.
An Ingenious Man who had built a flying-machine invited a great concourse of people to see it go up. At the appointed moment, everything being ready, he boarded the car and turned on the power. The machine immediately broke through the massive substructure upon which it was built, and sank out of sight into the earth, the aeronaut springing out barely in time to save himself.
"Well," said he, "I have done enough to demonstrate the correctness of my details. The defects," he added, with a look at the ruined brick-work, "are merely basic and fundamental."
Upon this assurance the people came forward with subscriptions to build a second machine.
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 – c. 1914) was an influential American author, journalist, and poet. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. His story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has been described as "one of the most famous and frequently anthologized stories in American literature". In 1913, Bierce told reporters that he was travelling to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He disappeared and was never seen again. (Biography borrowed from Wikipedia.)
Hardboiled
She was a devious dame with legs that wouldn’t quit and a past that haunted her big green eyes.
He was a whiskey-swilling gumshoe who had been knocked on the head a few too many times, but he was still alert enough to notice that her husband was paying all the bills.
“You haven’t been straight with me,” he growled.
“I can’t be straight with anyone,” she retorted, and slapped him.
He slapped her back, hard, and she took it like a man, because she was a man, as he realized when the blonde wig fell off.
Suddenly, he understood why nothing made sense any more, and what was behind the endless sequence of incoherent plot twists and unrelated clues, the artificial dialog, his jumbled thoughts, the throbbing headache.
Spillane was having a seizure.
Wanda Farr is the pen name of a retired English teacher who lives in another place.
Modern Literature
Oskar gave the chatbot a prompt. The prompt was, “Write a story in which a man tells a chatbot to write a story about a chatbot that is instructed to write a story about a chatbot writing a story.” This was exactly the kind of thing the chatbot could handle with ease. The second part of the prompt was, “Make the story exactly six sentences.” The chatbot began collecting words and putting phrases together until it had completed the assignment. This is that story.
Oskar Greenblatt hastens to assure everyone that this story was written by a human being with no AI assistance.
Cirque du Silly
One summer, I went to Circus Camp. As an acrobat, I was overcome by terror, lost my grip on the trapeze, and plunged into the net before my partner could grab my ankles. Animals hated me. The dancing horse tried to bite me, and the performing poodles peed on my shoes. I looked hilarious in clown makeup, but my timing was terrible, and I was trampled while exiting the tiny car. I tried juggling and hit myself in the face with the balls. Fortunately, the camp staff were brilliant photographers; the shots they posted on Instagram made my family proud.
R.K. West is a Canadian-American writer specializing in very short fiction. @ithinkiwrite.bsky.social
Credit: This story originally appeared at 100 Words.
I Didn’t Know There Were People Like That
by John Bruce
Once I answered a help-wanted ad for a network engineer.
They had an extra requirement: the candidate should have strong writing skills, since they wanted a lot of documentation. Well, I’d done a lot of network engineering, I’d also written network manuals, and I’d majored in English. I sent in my resume – like any good player in the job market, I had several versions. I sent them the one with the English major listed on it.
A few days later, the hiring manager gave me a call. We talked about my network experience, and we talked about majoring in English. That seemed good enough; he asked me to come in for an interview. “It’s really interesting,” the manager said to me when I came in. “Not many people major in English and wind up in this kind of work.” The guy gave me a technical question-and-answer on what I knew about networks, and he realized that yes, I knew network engineering. And I could write.
”Have you done much with writing outside the technical field?” he asked after a while.
”I’ve had a few things in the local alternative press,” I said. “But it’s just a hobby.”
”It’s really interesting that you’ve kept it up.” We chatted a little more about that. I told him I actually kept reading, too, reading the same writers they had you read as an English major.
”There’s no money in it,” I said. “For most people, it really can’t be anything but a hobby.”
”I should be up front with you about one thing,” the guy told me. “We’ve already made an offer on this job. The guy hasn’t accepted it yet, but he could, so since we’ve already got the offer out, you need to understand that the guy could take it, and he’d be the one we hire.”
”Sure,” I said. The guy had just told me he’d wasted my time, of course.
”I really wanted to talk to you, though,” he said. “I really wanted to meet someone who’d kept up his interest in English and writing after he’d graduated. It’s really been interesting talking to you. In fact, that was why I called you in. I didn't know there were people like that.”
Thanks.
John Bruce’s writing has appeared, or will appear, in The Los Angeles Reader, The Dartmouth Review, serious-lit press, Fiction on the Web, Cantaraville, Bartleby Snopes, Diddledog, Eunoia Review, Fiction at Work, The Journal of Truth and Consequence, Long Story Short, The Toucan, Lyrical Ballads, Pear Noir!, Lowestoft Chronicle, Underground Voices, and Word Riot. He has degrees in English from Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
Her Song
by Huina Zheng
When my daughter came home from school, she didn’t call out to me like she usually did. She changed into her slippers by the door, her lips pressed into a thin line.
I opened my arms to hug her. She turned slightly and slipped past me.
“I’m fine,” she said. She didn’t look at me. Then she walked into her room and closed the door.
I stood there. That afternoon, her homeroom teacher had messaged me on WeChat. She had been class president for two years, but this time she lost the election by three votes.
Just three votes.
I knew that feeling. In seventh grade, I slipped from the top five in my class to the twenties. My mother stopped me in the living room. Her finger tapped my forehead as she told me I had become lazy, that I had disappointed her. I bit my lip. I didn’t argue. Didn’t explain. Didn’t cry.
When I got back to my room, I could taste blood. I lay on my bed and started singing. I don’t even remember which Faye Wong song it was. I only remember that, little by little, I felt myself calm down.
Now, I heard a song coming from behind my daughter’s door. It was the one she sang all the time. Her voice shook at first. But as she continued singing, it became steadier.
I stood outside her room. I did not knock. I did not ask, “Are you okay?” I hummed along with the melody coming from inside.
She didn’t know I was outside. But I knew that inside that room, she was using the same way I once had to bring herself back.
Huina Zheng either writes as an admission coach at work or writes for fun after work. She lives in Guangzhou, China, with her family.
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