Lorrie Moore

An anthology of ten short stories focuses on women who are on the brink of loneliness--their mothers are dying, their husbands and lovers are leaving them--and who face their disappointments with anxiety laced with ironic humor. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Self-Help

Beatriz Salvador 

And when your mother starts to lose her mind, so do you. You begin to be afraid of people on the street. You see shapes - old men and spiders - in the wallpaper again like when you were little and sick. The moon's reflection on the lake starts to look to you like a dead fish floating golden belly up. Ask anyone. Ask anyone whose mother is losing her mind. 

A series of pictures here of mothers and daughters switching places - women switching places to take care of one another. You, the daughter, becoming the mother, the Ceres, and she the daughter, kidnapped to hell, and you roam the earth to find her, to mourn her, leaving the trees and grain to wither, having no peace, you have no peace. 

In my little white house I am in a slump. I look around. All these possessions, all these new things, are little teeth, death markers, my home one compact little memorial park remember when they used to be caller cemeteries. Now even gravestones are called family monuments, like these things, monuments to the family. I stare at my gold faucets, my new chairs, my popcorn popper, and my outsized spice rack - thyme leaves, time leaves - and wonder how they got here, how I have arrived at this point of clutter. These things, things, things, my mind is shouting and I hurl appliances, earrings, wine glasses, into the kitchen trash and, gripped immediately by a panic, pick them out again, hurry, hurry, one by one, rinse them off, put them back away, behind their doors, watch TV, breathe, watch TV. 

bella

“Cold men destroy women," my mother wrote me years later. "They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes —you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect's drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone."

“‘Your numbness,’ my mother cries softly, ‘is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.’"

A week, a month, a year. The sadness will die like an old dog. You will feel nothing but indifference.

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