Polymorphia
I’ll shed those onerous memories and transform into an animal unconstrained by terrible burdens. I’ll lead a life without guilt.
“You’re the only one I can talk to,” he’d rumble in his sexy bass. “No way I can do this with the mother of my calf. She stands with her trunk erect when I’m grazing, blasting me if I don’t reach for the tallest branches.”
meant
She’s a little uneven and slow, too. I nudge her along, but she says in her squeaky voice, “Please stay away from me.”
Martha Anne Toll's fiction has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Slush Pile Magazine, Yale's Letters Journal, Inkapture Magazine, Referential Magazine, and Poetica E Magazine. Her essays and reviews have appeared on NPR, in The Millions, Narrative Magazine, [PANK] Magazine, Cargo Literary, Bloom, Tin House blog, The Nervous Breakdown, Heck Magazine, and the Washington Independent Review of Books. Martha is the Executive Director of a social justice philanthropy focused on preventing homelessness and reforming the criminal justice system. Find her on Twitter @marthaannetoll
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The New Grandma
Good mothers don’t lose composure, she thought, even if an asteroid is heading at them, they don’t loosen screen time limits or miss piano lessons.
Pinned
“I didn’t even realize the sun had already set,” I said, turning on a light for Herrick. He awoke with a jerk. “Time to eat.”