by Sommer Schafer

Excerpted from Fiction Number 62 (2016).

IT WAS NO USE SAYING SO, but Father had told Frank that actually Mother had been raised with her two brothers and sister in a series of rentals across the country because her father couldn’t keep a job, and that those rentals were none other than cheap single-floor houses, hastily built within the past decade, and would be long gone in another 50 years. As a young child Frank had been in awe of Mother’s “exaggerations,” and she would, when the mood struck, tell the best bedtime stories complete with sighs and gasps and fabulous intrigue and, once or twice, a scream that would shock and delight him. Other times she would render him prostrate with fear; blood-curdling screams when she saw spiders; great, loud uptakes of air when she saw a “ghastly shadow” during the occasional family nighttime walks they used to take; uncontrollably shrieking and weeping when their twenty-year-old cat appeared dead on the bathroom floor. Now that he was nine, he was beginning to see that her exaggerations were none other than little white lies; that she was well practiced at reconstructing the truth to fit her mood. “Some people need drama in order to feel alive,” she had told him once as they sat watching Oprah, her arm over his shoulders. “A shame, huh?”

The full story can be found in Fiction Number 62. Please follow the subscribe link for information on ordering.