Outside the Y a mother plops her shrieking toddler onto a stone bench for a stern talking-to. She wears a quilted coat and racing tights; beneath the child’s wooly hat he wears the implacable expression signaling a standoff. Frustration radiating off her like steam, she crouches down to hiss fiercely into the small boy’s face, and I imagine him in thirty years, tearfully accepting an Oscar and thanking his mother for all she did for him, or in a therapist’s office blinking back a different kind of tears for the mother who became the obstacle he fought hard to overcome.
Beth Bilderback has been published in the The Lascaux Review, Rappahannock Review, KYSO Flash, Cleaver, Blink-Ink, PROEM, and Atlas and Alice.