Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 23 by www.clarkesworldmagazine.com; Yoon Ha Lee; Meghan McCarron; Theodora Goss

Author:www.clarkesworldmagazine.com; Yoon Ha Lee; Meghan McCarron; Theodora Goss
Format: mobi
Tags: science fiction, science fiction magazine, short story, fantasy, magazine, clarkesworld
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2008-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

“Her Mother’s Ghosts”

by Theodora Goss

Her name is Ilona. The other children at school call her Smellona. She is not me, but I have been her. Here are the things I remember most clearly:

She lives in a townhouse in Washington D.C. with her mother and younger brother, whose bangs are always cut crooked. It is the seventies. She and her brother wear clothes they will later call hideous in photographs, but now, today, they are not hideous, because brown is still a respectable color. They are playing under the cherry trees. The blossoms are everywhere, lying on the asphalt in heaps like pink snow.

In the kitchen drawer are silver spoons, smuggled in socks, the sleeves of pajamas. They are heavy, dulled with use. They are older than her mother, her grandmother. One is much worse for having slipped into the garbage disposal. In the kitchen cabinet are margarine tubs, more than ten, perhaps more than twenty, washed clean, ready in case the world runs out of margarine tubs. Don’t laugh. It could happen.

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