Mary Anne Griffiths

My mother is in the turquoise sewing room, trapped with her hate of mending and thread, stitches, needles, and scissors, all things that cut and bind. I walk in, crying and crying, unable to remember why. But it’s all upheaval, an out-of-control thing I can’t possibly rein in with my littleness. She tears the cloth she has just sewn together and is wringing it over and over, and the room is too blue for me, and I can’t breathe, and the room pales and begins to fall away. She saves me by taking a murky bottle out of the sewing box, holding it up in my face. Inside I see a part of the moon, small white rocks with jagged craters floating in brown-black bile, and she yells and yells, shaking me with her other hand saying, This is what they have cut out of me, these are the rocks they mined out of my gut. Look, look, look!  

I am floating back to earth, gravity tugging at my pant legs, thinking if they had taken the moon out of my mother, what will they pull out of me?

Mary Anne Griffiths (she/her) is a poet and fiction writer living in Ingersoll, Ontario, Canada. She is presently working towards her debut collection of poetry and microfiction. Her work can be found in Dark Winter Lit Mag, Bright Flash Literary Review, Macrame Literary Journal, The Lothlorien, and Your Sudden Flash.