When I’m about to go away to college, my grandmother dies and my mother silently puts herself up for adoption.
LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO ADOPT ME: Kind, lonely, beautiful woman in her 50s. Dead husband. No children. Cooks and cleans. 4’11 and 90 lbs. Guaranteed to take up no space. Call 609-538-1212 for further questions.
She writes the advertisement on the backs of index cards and covers them in shiny tape and pastes them with purple glue from Staples onto tree trunks two towns north of Princeton. I imagine her hiding stacks of white index cards at the bottom of her backpack, fitting her bag and body underneath a grey sweatshirt, her spine growing into a mountain. Waddling in her orthopedic slippers from tree trunk to tree trunk. Looking over her shoulder to make sure that the Chinese mothers she’s met through WeChat aren’t around (always behind their phones, always seated inside their identical kitchens and feeding their working husbands tasteless, clear broth every night). The Chinese mothers are always looking for opportunities to gossip about another mother’s sadness.
My father finds the ad when he’s walking back home from the airport. He’s just returned to New Jersey after spending a week in Canada lecturing ENTs on how to capitalize on the internet’s fascination with removing large masses of ear wax from our self-cleaning bodies. He chooses to walk home so that his time away from us is as long as possible, even if it’s just a couple hours more. When my mother called him three days ago, she asked him to stop going on business trips. (He’s getting old, and more importantly she is too). He calmly said that the extra money never hurt anyone. But over the years the trips have gotten longer and longer and the money, my mother complains to me, has stayed the same. He told us that he walks for the exercise, for the fresh air, for the opportunity to live longer. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are bills rolled into his socks, sewn into the hems of his pants—the possibility of escape, green and sweaty, slapping against his skin wherever he walks.
When my father sees the index cards, he hastily removes them and puts them in his pocket. As he’s about to turn onto Cherry Hill Road, he finds one more index card (the last one, he’s certain). He takes out a pen and crosses out my mother’s cell phone number and pencils in his. I ask him about this weeks later, when it’s just the two of us watching TV in the family room. Why did you leave one up? He shrugs and and hides his voice inside the crinkling of a newspaper. Why wouldn’t you take them all down? He sighs and says he was just curious. He wanted to meet a person who would want to adopt my mother. Maybe it would help him take better care of her. And all I can think to say is Why do you need to be taught how to care? For a while my father doesn’t answer me, and when he finally does he just says that he has to go, that he is going to be late. What for? He points the remote at the TV and presses the volume button with his thumb. I watch the little bar at the bottom of the screen fill up as it gets louder and louder. He leaves. His suit jacket is left on the chair, wrinkled, with balled-up index cards filling the pockets like pearls. After he’s gone, I leave too. I search for hours, and I finally find it. The lone index card, flattened with glue onto a tree. I take out a pen and cross out my father’s number and pencil in mine.
The first call comes the day after I’ve finished moving into my dorm. My roommate is out with a friend. I’ve just gotten out of the shower when my phone starts to vibrate.
“Hi there. I’m calling about the adoption. My name is Steve and my wife just died. I was thinking we could keep each other company. I really liked what you wrote about yourself. My wife used to cook and was small too. She liked to whistle when she cooked. Are you averse to whistling? Maybe I can come up with a list of little habits and things my wife used to do and you can learn them and come over sometime. I just need another body in the house, that’s all. My body feels too big right now. I’ve been eating all the foods my wife used to like. I wonder if that’ll make things better. Do you-—”
I end the call, and the line goes dead. I take out my laptop and open an Excel sheet. I type the number and the reason for the call inside the blinking cells. Without thinking, I call my mom. A voice immediately says that the caller can’t be reached, that this number is unknown. And for a brief moment I wonder if she’s dead.
I want to text my younger brother Mark, but I don’t know his number anymore. When he first got his phone in middle school, our mother would call him every other hour to make sure he was okay. He quickly got into the habit of changing his number slightly every month. It would ring and ring, and my mother, even knowing what my brother had done, would still leave him long voice messages. She’d ask him where he was and when he’d be home. She’d tell him that his love was small and needed to be bigger. And when Mark would finally come through the door, she’d hug him and ask if he got her message, and he would always say yes, and together we’d watch him walk up the stairs to his room. My brother and I were barely able to keep in contact when we were living in the same house. He would sometimes let me know his new number, his latest switch. But now that I’m miles away, it doesn’t matter.
So instead I text my father to ask how my mother is doing and I watch the grey dots pop and disappear, pop and disappear, until five minutes later he replies with just fine, just resting. I ask if my mother ever mentions me, and he says he doesn’t know. She hasn’t been speaking much lately. She doesn’t even have a phone anymore. How can she not have a phone? And he tells me that he came home from work one day to find it shattered at the edge of the kitchen table, the shards of screen covering the table in tiny mirrors. He offered to buy her a new one, but she refused.
I fall onto my bed and smash my ears with my hands until my lobes turn red and hot and uncomfortable, and I can focus on that.
When I was five my mother wore a hearing aid for a year. It started because she claimed that my brother’s constant screaming as a baby had permanently ruined her hearing. My father thought that we’d all be good and convenient marketing tools for a new batch that just got sent to his office. He started by giving only my mother a pair. Back then, it would be my mother and me in the house for hours and hours. And when we were alone, she would take out her hearing aid. Knowing it was only me and I would always come.
“Lily? Hello? Hello?” my mother yelled from the kitchen.
“Here! Here! I’m home! I’m home!” I yelled from my bedroom.
“Lily? Are you there? I can’t hear you.”
“I’m here!”
“I don’t hear Lily. Is she home? Do I have a daughter?”
“Yes! Yes! I’m here. Mommy, I’m here. Please tell me I’m here.” I’d go to the edge of the staircase.
“Lily? Lily?”
I’d finally run down the stairs to my mother crying, so afraid that I had become a nothing. She would see my tears and smile.
“Oh, Lily, it’s you. You’re here. You’re here and your mommy’s got you.”
“Yes, Mommy, yes.”
Soon I learned to stay within a small radius from my mother. Twenty large steps on some days, fifteen small ones on others. I learned the areas of the house where I existed and those where I didn’t.
The second call comes in early October. I’m with my first boyfriend in his dorm room. We’ve known each other for three weeks now. I’m convinced that I love him. I haven’t made a friend yet in college. It’s okay, love is supposed to be all-consuming, I reason. While we’re studying at his desk, I confidently ask, “Do you love me?”
“Yes,” he says, typing a long equation into his calculator.
“Why?”
“What did you say?”
I clear my throat. “Why specifically do you love me?”
He looks up at me quickly. “What do you mean?”
“Like is there a list of reasons for why you love me?”
“I don’t know, you’re funny and smart and pretty and wake me up when I sleep through my alarm. You brush your teeth really thoroughly. I don’t know, Lily. Can we talk about this some other time? I’m really trying to get this p-set done.”
I stare at his back. Certain that he’ll feel it, turn around and look at me, beg for me to stop. Nothing happens.
“Five,” I say.
“No, the answer’s eight.” He taps his finger loudly on the computer screen. “Can you actually try to help out? Please? I said you were smart.”
“You only gave me five reasons for why you love me. Is that it?”
“Can’t I just say that I love you? Isn’t that enough?”
I don’t talk for the rest of the night, using my silence as punishment. Because in the quiet, I know he will come up with a thousand reasons why he loves me. But nothing happens. And two hours later he turns off his desk lamp, tucks himself into bed, and falls fast asleep. I open the smallest pocket in my backpack and unwrap a ball of tissue. I take out two hearing aids, old and cracked, black batteries dripping from long wires. I stuff them in my ears, hard and close to the drum, just like I imagine my mother would. I turn the volume up all the way until the silence becomes loud and bearable.
When I check my phone, it says that I have one new voice message. I press the phone to my ear and watch my boyfriend sleep. Everything is so dark and quiet. I feel like if I touch him, he’ll pool across my fingers, like water tumbling out of a glass. A lady’s voice comes out scratchily from my phone, saying her phone number over and over again, each time louder than the last. As if she thinks I can’t hear, as if she knows I’m not really listening. This is Susan looking to adopt. I’m looking to take care of someone. Please call me at 617-825-9911. It’s Susan, please call 617-825-9911. Take care. It’s Susan, 617-825-9911, looking. Susan. 617-825-9911. It’s 617-825-9911. Please, 617-825-9911. 617-825-9911, wanting to care.
I record the number in the spreadsheet, and wonder how I’m supposed to call these people back. What I’m supposed to say. That the thing they want to adopt is not for sale—that it’s old and used and mine. I wonder what would happen if my mother went to any of these interviews. What dress she would wear, how much makeup she’d slather on her face, whether she’d take the photos of us out from her wallet beforehand and ball them in a sweaty fist. If she’d still say my father was dead, if maybe I was a dead daughter too. If she did mention us, I wondered if she’d say I died first or my brother. Or if maybe she’d say we had been murdered, had committed suicide, some unnatural death that made our lives more and more out of her hands. For a minute, I think about contacting the Chinese mothers. That maybe they could shame my mother back into being ours. And as I stare at my boyfriend, I wonder if we should all put ourselves up for adoption. To be newly wanted. To never look back at the things we decided we no longer needed.
When I was eight, I tried to get closer to my mother by stealing her sadness. While she nursed my little brother, he would scream and chew on her nipples. My father would quickly walk past the bedroom to get to the garage and pretend that he couldn’t hear a thing. My mother’s mouth would tremble and collapse into tiny o’s as she stuffed her screams back into herself. She treated her body like a storage locker. A rented space, filled with everything she didn’t want but couldn’t dispose of.
One day in the summer, when my mother finally left her rocking chair to make us dinner, I sat in it and took off my shirt. I held my plastic baby doll to my chest, making its shut lips kiss my breast. I carefully opened the mouths of clothespins and placed my tiny girl nipples inside them. I added more and more, around my flat nipples in a circle, until it looked like a wooden sunflower. I bit my lip and balled my fists and refused to cry. I sat in the chair, clutching the plastic doll that didn’t look anything like me and I closed my eyes and willed myself to be like my mother—to be as I saw her: a female god, unnoticed and unworshipped.
I screamed.
My mother was beside me in seconds.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, she muttered under her breath each time she pulled a clothespin from my nipple. When she looked at my face and saw that I was still crying, her mouth went slack. She thought that at eight I was already losing my love for her. The veteran Chinese mothers had warned her how easy a child’s love is to lose. It’s because American mothers don’t understand how love works. They love their children in all the wrong ways. They don’t love them enough. And then our children see that kind of love and no longer trust our love. It’s a shame. It happens to all of us. It’s not our fault. So she quickly undid her mistake. She kissed me and held me tight against her lumpy skin until I was sitting in the fat of her stomach, and it was like I was hers again, kept inside her like a secret. My mother went back to removing clothespins.
When all the clothespins were off, she looked at my breasts again, swollen girl bits, bruised fruit, bigger than they should’ve been. A bigness that she was certain would get me in trouble when I was fully grown. She pushed her palms into my chest, pressing hard as if she wanted my nipples to disappear inside of me. My mother looked at my face and smiled. Afraid that she’d scared me, that she’d lost more of my love, she took out my diary from her desk and handed me a pen. And just as I’d gotten used to doing, I wrote I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you forever and ever and ever in ink. My mom held the book so tight in her arms it left red imprints on her drooping skin.
“Mommy just wants you to grow up right, to get the best boy, and have the best children, and always come back home and eat pancakes and drink tea with Mommy. You know Mommy is your best friend? You know nobody will ever love you as much as Mommy? Mommy’s love is the best love.”
I nodded and she dropped my journal and pressed her hands tighter against my chest and held them there, until we were so close, slowly turning into one person.
Hours later, when I was sitting at the table, wearing a bandage flattening my chest, I saw my mother through the window. She was in the backyard latching her damp underwear onto a thin red string with my clothespins. I watched the wet white float in the wind. Flaps of skin. Transparent and clean. Somewhere in the house, my brother was screaming and I think he had been for a while, or maybe he’d been silent all along.
My brother will continue to scream long after he is a little boy. He will scream especially when my mother tries to talk to him. He’ll smile as the noise erupts deep from within his belly, tiny bullets of sound packed with air, sticky with spit, ricocheting around the room. I have never yelled and will never learn to yell.
Ashamed but tired, my mother will turn to the Chinese WeChat mothers. How do I mother? How do I be a good mother? And when my mother asks these questions I will always wonder who she was trying to be a good mother for. Maybe being a mother is the only way to repay your mother. Within seconds, the Chinese mothers type: Put him in the dark.
A day later, the power will go off and it will just be my brother and me alone in the house. I feel my body tumbling out of me. I wonder if my mother has ever tried to scream, or my grandmother, and I imagine all of us, side by side, trying to stuff ourselves back into our bodies, like shoving cotton into the flat skin of a rag doll. This is what a woman’s noise looks like. A couple minutes later the lights go back on, and I see my brother, wet and smiling, on the other side of the room.
The third call comes in November. It’s evening, and my roommate is lying on the top bunk, her feet dangling, half rolled into her socks. I’m on the bottom bunk, playing with my phone—warm and hard in my hand. Every time she shifts, I shift too. The top bunk groans and I watch the metal frame press deeper and deeper above me, a growing belly.
Emma and I don’t talk, but I know many things about her. I know what brand of underwear she likes, how many alarms she sleeps through, what lies she chooses to tell her friends on the phone. I don’t know why we’re not friends by now. Maybe I’ve been talking to her about the wrong things. Maybe she doesn’t know I’d like to be close. So, quietly, from my bottom bunk, I finally speak.
“Hey, Emma. Did you say your mom’s coming up this weekend? What’s she like?” I make myself smile even though I know she can’t see me. “I’d love to meet her.”
“Huh?” she says. “Sorry, I was listening to music.”
I clear my throat. “I said, what’s your mom like?”
“Oh, you know. Like all moms.”
“Yeah, of course.” I pause and try to think of something to say. “What are you guys going to do when she comes up?”
“I don’t know. She’ll probably make me hang out with her or something.”
“Oh, that’ll be nice,” I mumble.
“Yeah, I know this sounds bad, but I just do it for the money. Like my mom’s great and all, but hanging out with people here is an investment. Like, in my future. My mom will always be here, you know? She’s not going anywhere.”
“I think I get what you’re saying.” I play with my phone and start scrolling on Emma’s Instagram page, finding something else to talk about.
“It’s weird. I think if she loved me a little less I would care more. I would maybe love her more.”
I nod even though she can’t see me.
“But yeah,” Emma continues. “My mom’s the worst. She now has this idea that we should both get our faces redone together by the same plastic surgeon. Have ourselves come out like twins. Like sisters. It’s gross. Anyway, what’s yours like?”
My phone begins to vibrate then and a new call flashes on the screen. I quickly excuse myself from the room. I hear a little girl sobbing.
“Hello? Are you okay?”
“Hello? My mommy hasn’t come back yet, and it’s been a week.”
I start chewing on my lip until there’s dead skin, and I pull and pull.
“Is your daddy home? What’s your name?” I hold the phone closer to my ear.
“He’s around. He stays in his car a lot, though, and doesn’t want to come inside.”
“What’s your name?” I repeat again.
“That’s dangerous,” she says softly and starts crying again and begins to hiccup. “Can you be my mommy until my real mommy comes back? Please? Please?”
“I’m not sure that’s—”
“Please? I’ll be good, and I’ll hide you under my bed. You said you’re small. Or you can have my bed, and I can sleep underneath. I’m small too. It’s like you gave it to me. Like a present. Please.”
I don’t say anything and start walking around the hallway, pacing from wall to wall until it feels like I’m running even though I’m not. The walls feel tight. Like they’re taking one giant breath in.
“Mommy?”
I don’t think I’m supposed to answer. I don’t think that’s something my mother would do, but still I hear myself saying yes.
“Will I see you soon?”
“Mhm. Yes, soon.” And I end the call. My body feels hard and small, and I want to go home. I wish that little girl had actually been able to reach my mother. It would be good for that girl to have my mother. Maybe it was wrong for me to put my number up. To steal all these people who wanted my mother. I jump when I enter my dorm. It’s Emma, my new friend. I wait until she leaves and shove myself underneath the bunk bed. I lie on the floor and stare up at my sagging mattress, clutching my phone to my chest, hoping somebody will find us.
When I am twelve, I learn to resent my mother’s love. I am in eighth grade and on an overnight school trip in Washington, D.C. My mother only lets me go because she thinks it will hurt my final grade in social studies if she keeps me at home. It wouldn’t have, and I don’t tell her otherwise. I need myself to grow up faster.
Most of my twenty-person class is sprawled out on some armchairs at a motel, our limbs shiny and stretched and thin, like supple taffy. It’s nighttime, and the end to a day of listening to soft voices on pre-recorded tapes telling us about woolly mammoths and Christopher Columbus and the Renaissance.
The majority of the class is dating. Eight couples in all. So I shouldn’t be surprised when one of the boys proposes that we play seven minutes in heaven. The sixteen coupled people all huddle together and look at the four of us who remain single. Assessing us, tapping into their superior knowledge of love to pair us up. I get married off to Laird, a boy with thick lips and acne, deep and pocked into his skin.
The couple girls corral the non-couple girls like cows, herding us into one of the bathrooms and slapping makeup onto our faces. Someone opens an eyelash curler and it bites my eyelid and I scream out. A hand grabs the back of my head to hold me still as someone draws winged eyeliner on me. Another hand lifts my shirt (it’s pink and thinning and has a tiny Snoopy tucked away near the right sleeve). She tosses it off my body and the girls gasp.
“What’s that on your chest? Is there something wrong with you?” Coupled Girl One asks.
“I thought people were supposed to wear stuff like this,” I say quietly.
“No. Real girls wear bras. The point is to make your boobs look bigger than they are,” Coupled Girl One almost yells like a chant, and lifts her black shirt to reveal boobs slathered in red lace.
“Are you really a girl?” Coupled Girl Two asks and jabs my breast with her finger.
“I am,” I whisper. And I think about my mother saying that if anyone saw my breasts, they’d fall off and I’d just be left with two gaping holes that kids would want to stick their hands into. I try hard to not look down.
“What is that?” Coupled Girl One places her ear next to my lips and I smell her burnt hair and see her breasts, and even though I know it’s impossible, I still find myself wondering if they’ll fall off if I touch them now.
“It’s not my fault,” I say louder.
“Well, whose is it then?”
“My mom’s,” I say, and add, speaking louder: “She’s crazy. She’s basically obsessed with me.”
“OMG does your mom want to marry you?” Coupled Girl Three yells out.
“Does she want to fuck you?” Coupled Girl Two screams.
“She does! She does! And I bet you do too,” Coupled Girl Four says giddily.
In one swift motion, I unravel my bandage and the room goes silent. Normal breasts. Fat stuffed into bags of skin. Normal nipples. I unhook Coupled Girl One’s bra and with trembling hands put it on and walk out of the bathroom. When I leave, the boys are waiting at the door. I see Laird and I immediately shove his hands onto my breasts. The boys cheer and stomp their feet. I kiss him and he opens his mouth. I place my hands on his face and I discover that his pimples aren’t as big as they look. He shoves his tongue into my mouth and starts moving it around, scooping me out like the soft flesh of a watermelon, until I’m eaten and hollow. A waxy rind. My mother might have been right about something, but it’s too late.
When I come home off the bus, I’m still in Coupled Girl One’s red bra. My mother can see it through my shirt.
“Lily, what on earth are you wearing?”
I ignore her and open up a kitchen drawer. I find her old hearing aids and stick them in my ears. The battery still works and I turn the dial up all the way until everything my mother says is so loud it hurts to hear her, and I keep the pain. Hold it tight to my chest. I wear the hearing aids like that for a month, until I don’t hear my mother at all. Even when we’re in the same room. Even when we’re twenty large steps away, sometimes fifteen small ones. Hello? Hello? Nothing.
The day of my grandmother’s funeral, I watch my mother closely. Before they open the lid, my mother shields my grandmother’s face with her body and takes out a cheap tube of red lipstick and wipes it across her lips. My mother gets out of her seat eight times during the twenty-minute-long ceremony. She rearranges flowers, takes away flowers, brings a small grey tulip with her back to her seat. I can see her quietly rustling the petals to her ear, and I wonder what it sounds like through her hearing aid. I wonder if through her fingers she’s rubbing a staticky wind into her ears. I try to think of what my mother was like as a girl, and I can’t do it. The only way I’m able to imagine my mother as a child is from the one story I know from my grandmother. She told me how my mother planted a whole garden of canned tomato soup. She’d open the lids a crack, and smoosh them underground. She had said to my grandmother that she wanted to plant something pre-grown, to be guaranteed that she was doing something right. Of course, when my grandmother found out, she made my mother unplant all of the aluminium cans, rinse off the tomatoes in the sink, and eat them one by one for dinner.
I wonder if daughters’ bodies are just caskets for their mothers to crawl into when they die. I imagine all of these women walking up and down the streets with old bodies jostling around in the pits of their stomachs, hanging from their bones like bats. And I wonder if my father’s body is going to be shoved inside my brother’s body like an overstuffed closet, but I know deep down that that’s not how it works. Men’s bodies aren’t built on memory.
It took my father two weeks to tell Mark and me about the index cards. can u or ur brother set up a youtube thing for my practice this weekend? he texted my brother and me after sending a blurry photo of one of my mother’s index cards. oh and don’t worry about your mother. i asked siri and she says this is the fifth stage of grief. there are only seven. Half an hour later another text came in and I thought of my father, sitting in his plastic-covered driver’s seat, slowly typing with his small, dry thumbs: anyway, nobody would adopt your mother. it’s stupid to worry. I read all of the texts, and I’m sure my brother Mark did too, and neither one of us replied.
I’m alone when I get the final call in December. It’s from an unknown number.
“Hi, can I get more details on the adoptee?” It’s a woman. Her voice sounds funny.
“Yeah, what do you want to know?” I sit down at my desk. I’ve broken up with my boyfriend, and it’s getting hard for me to remember him exactly. I don’t think I could tell you why I loved him. I couldn’t list more than three things.
“In your card, you say that your husband died and you have no children. Did you ever want to be a mom?”
It’s my mother.
I start painting my nails, and I make my voice go lower to match my mom’s. “Yeah, I think I always wanted kids. It’s nice not to be alone.”
There’s a pause on the phone, and I wonder if she realizes that I know she’s the one who’s calling. “That makes sense.”
The phone goes silent for a bit and gets staticky and I wonder if the call dropped. “Do you think you would’ve been a good mother?” she asks.
I suck in my breath and try to think about how my mother would answer, what she and the Chinese WeChat mothers would say. “I would. I’d love my kids. I’d love them from the moment they were born. Then they’d turn into teenagers, and I’d love them more. They’d leave me and I’d still love them even more. I would just keep loving and loving and loving, and they’d have no choice but to love me back.”
“But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they just leave and your love is not good enough, maybe has never been good enough, and what are you supposed to do then?” she says.
I start doodling in my notebook. Throughout my life, nobody has turned out to be as powerful as I thought my mother was when I was little, least of all my mother.
“Lily?” says the voice quietly. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You weren’t supposed to find out. It was just going to be temporary, something just for me.” My mother pauses and then laughs. “You know, this is going to sound crazy but there are some days when I think the silence is like a person, a third child. I sometimes think the silence in a room is hugging me, and then I feel warm and I think of you. Sometimes the silence is more of a faraway wind, and I think of your brother. But on most days, I feel like I’m being swallowed, trapped in some invisible belly. And Lily, I don’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to do. I’m sorry.”
I stand up and press the phone hard to my lips, breathing in and out. I see drops of my spit on the phone screen. A plasticky kiss. For a while I hear silence, and then there’s “Lily? Hello? Please answer.”
“Mom? Mom? Hello? Mom?”
“Lily?”
“Mommy? Hello? Mommy?”
There’s silence.
“Mommy, I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you forever and ever and ever.”
The call ends. I look down at the screen before it flashes black. I see that my thumb has been pressed against the mute button. I take my finger off the screen and try calling the home number, but I keep hearing Your phone call can’t be completed as dialed. Please try again and I keep trying again and trying again and nothing happens. It’s just me and the phone and I whisper to the both of us I’m here! I’m here! Lily I’m here! Lily, Lily, Lily, I’m here. Because I know that that is how my mother would respond if she had heard me. I put my hearing aids in and I scream as loud as I can I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you into my empty room. Because that’s what my mom would have said, if she had heard me. She’d say it until her voice went hoarse and we would just be there in silence on the phone. Smiling. A beautiful, wonderful silence. I know that’s how it would be. It really would. There are some things I just know.
Sabrina Helen Li is a senior studying English at Harvard College. Her very short fiction pieces have been published in Black Warrior Review and elsewhere, but this is her first full-length story to appear in print.
