This is the first story I sold. It was to an awsome on-line magazine, no longer with us, alas, with the wonderful name of Bovine Free Wyoming. Here is how awesome it was: this is the picture on their masthead. Is that swell, or what?

This story was another writing exercise at a Green River Writers retreat, so you see why I like to go to those.

Anyway, here it is:

Caffeine High
by Marian Allen

My mother hasn’t been out of the house for two months. She hasn’t left the kitchen for a week. She takes sponge-baths at the sink. She wears a barbecue apron while she washes her clothes in the dishwasher and dries them in the warming oven.

Through the window, I watch her scrub counters, sweep, and mop the floor, amazed she can find so much to occupy herself in such a small territory. Nights, I sit outside the shed; the lit window glows like a television screen — reality show with the sound turned down.

Every day or so, she slips a grocery list out the window, and I go for supplies. She makes me frappacinos; I drink them until the top of my head unhinges and my brain flies above the roof, down the chimney, and sits at the kitchen table across from my mother, and we talk again.

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WRITING PROMPT: Write a character who can leave his/her body and interact with people in his/her astral form. What would he/she do?

MA