by Meg Pokrass

Mom was tired of what she called her curse, mouth yawning into a cave while making coffee, curling into new messages on her dating app, saying what is the point anyway once you’re cursed, saying the last one had a mullet and no sense of humor, saying her curse started long ago in childhood and there was nothing she could do about it. But, the next day my mother would say she was simply being silly and self-defeating, because she’d met someone called Perfecto on the new app who she’d immediately fallen in love with when she heard him speaking into a voice memo, and how the quality of his voice reminded her of our old parrot, Mr Poppers. Let’s get ourselves a new birdy to celebrate, she chirped, and I thought of how easily Mr Poppers had escaped and was probably now living happily in Central Park with his own kind, as if he too had been part of Mom’s curse and was never planning to hang around. I told myself that the idea of a curse was lame while noticing that all of Mom’s coffee mugs were cracked and the house looked dim even when the day was bright. Mom, I’m going to repair these cups, I said on a sunny morning, holding a supersized bottle of crazy glue to my chest like a bullet proof shield, noticing for the first time that all of Mom’s coats were gone, and the kitchen had been empty for a week, and I was cooking my own scrambled eggs nicked from the corner market, and on the three-legged coffee table there was a note saying I’ve just gone for a little walk with Perfecto in the sunlight.

Meg Pokrass has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including New England Review, Wigleaf, Electric Literature, Five Points, Plume, RATTLE, The Best Small Fictions 2025, and Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton, 2023). She has published 10 books of fiction and prose poetry. Her newest full collection, First Law of Holes: New and Selected Stories, is from Dzanc Books. Meg currently lives in the Scottish Highlands, where she serves as Founding/Managing Editor of Best Microfiction.