Inheriting Her Ghosts

by S.H. Cooper

While he had found his own portrait to be mediocre at best, he could hardly take his eyes from Mother’s. “It will do,” he had said simply, but to see him gaze at it ever after, then to Mother herself, was to see him become besotted all over again.

I’d always prided myself on being a rational woman, neither overly emotional or reactionary, but it would seem that such facades, no matter how carefully curated, could so quickly turn fragile.

There’s nothing so valuable as the ability to think during troubled times.

It was a restless place in a way I had not known a building could be; unsatisfied, hungry, the very air thick with its disquiet.

It was obvious in that single shared look, oblivious to all but each other, that I was witnessing two halves of a whole: the steady, reliant quill man and his doting, excitable wife.

"Thank you," I murmured to them and they wagged their tails. Of all the angels God had ever created, dogs were surely His greatest work.