The Perfect Mother

by Aimee Molloy

I spider my fingers across the sheets, remembering I’m alone. I close my eyes and find my way back to sleep, until I’m woken again, engulfed by a deep, sudden pain. I’ve been waking with a sick feeling every morning since he left, but I know right away this is different. Something’s wrong.

He’s the only one I want to speak to. I need to tell him what’s happening and hear him say that everything will be fine. I need to remind him, just one more time, how much I love him.

But he won’t answer. Or worse, he will, and he’ll seethe into the phone, telling me he won’t continue to put up with this, warning me that if I ever call him again, he’ll—

The pain grips my back so hard I can’t breathe. I wait for it to pass, for the moment of reprieve I’ve been...

But there was something else about Nell, something below the salty exterior I spotted from day one: she, like me, was a woman with a secret.

It’s no wonder I eventually started loathing them. Really, who can stand to listen to that level of certainty? To

What they are not talking about are the other genes I’ve inherited. The ones bestowed to me not by my equally symmetrical mother, but from my exceptionally bipolar dad.

Joshua’s genes are no better. I would talk to him about this sometimes, asking if it worried him, the DNA he has to work hard to outsmart. His own crazy father: the brilliant doctor, so warm and charming with patients. The violent alcoholic behind closed doors.

I would have given up everything—everything—to be with him again. Even for just one night. I couldn’t tell them that. I couldn’t tell anyone that. Not even Dr. H, shrink extraordinaire, who’d shuttered his office just when I needed him most,

I’ve been blamed for what happened that Fourth of July night. But not a day goes by that I don’t remind myself of the truth. It’s not my fault. It’s theirs.

It’s because of them that Midas went missing, and I lost everything. Even now, a year later, I sit alone in this prison cell, fingering the hard, jagged scar at my abdomen, thinking how differently everything might have turned out if it weren’t for them.

If only the words Nell spoke that day—her head tilted toward the sky, her features swallowed by the sun—hadn’t been so prescient: Bad things happen in heat like this.

Nell takes note of Winnie’s fingernails, bitten to the quick, and the thinly veiled look of concern under her smile.

She looks away, hoping nobody can sense the truth: she’s sick about the thought of cutting short her maternity leave in just five more days. She’s not ready to leave the baby, not yet, but she doesn’t have a choice.

the US is the only country besides Papua New Guinea that doesn’t mandate paid leave.

a triple exclamation point of a woman.

The face of a man, terrified and worried. A man having the same panicked thought as she. Please. Not this. Not again.

staring past her, beyond the stone wall, into the park. “Why does everybody like to tell new mothers what we’re about to gain? Why does nobody want to talk about what we have to lose?”

“Rosemary Carpenter.” By the stunned look on Nell’s face, it’s apparent Francie is supposed to know who that is. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know her.” “She started WFE,” Nell says.

Was it him? Was Bodhi Mogaro at the bar that night?

When Nell opens her eyes, the man at the bar is watching her. She closes her eyes again, this time seeing herself. She feels the heat and the pounding music. The crowd grows around them. She takes Winnie’s phone from Francie. She deletes the app.

Why? Why did she do that? Hadn’t she learned her lesson? One impulsive decision can destroy an entire life. If anyone should know that, it’s her.

Some want it to happen. Some wish it would happen. Some make it happen.

want to tell Dr. H where I am and how I’ve been feeling, and that, honestly, I never meant to kill anyone.

she opens The Village website and begins to type, hacking her way into the administration page. It takes less than five minutes. It’s something she’s been a natural at since her first computer science class—an instinct, one professor later said, or, as she likes to think of it, her superpower.

She closes her eyes and sees it: placing her belongings into a box at the State Department.

I can’t think rationally, linearly. Time is running in circles.”

The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest-lived.’”

I’m getting a little tired of the way women are being depicted in fiction right now, to be honest.”