THIRD PLACE WINNER
in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025!
Nuala O’Connor described Amy’s Mom as ‘… a perfectly pitched, voice-lead story of the luck of the draw, where teen girls get a dose of reality, and try to cope with it. Charming, moving, and irreverent.’
Listen to Emily reading Amy’s Mom:
After Amy’s mom drops dead, like literally drops right in her driveway, groceries spilled all around her, we sit in my basement and get high and plan what to do if ours do too. Meaning our moms. Meaning if they just drop dead.
Chrissy pulls her socks up and pushes them down, one leg at a time, over and over. Sarah kicks her to get her to stop, but she just moves out of reach and keeps going. I pack the pipe and hand it to Sarah, who takes a hit.
“I mean, fuck,” I say, and Sarah nods as she holds her breath. After a moment, she exhales through her nose and cough-barks, and on any other day, we would laugh, but today we’re just too weirded out that Amy’s mom is dead. Just yesterday she texted me to see if I wanted to go to Cincinnati for the long weekend with them. She said she would call my mom if I wanted to, that it would be nice for Amy to have a friend along, as if I was doing them a favor. That’s what she was like.
Chrissy makes a high-pitched noise, a whimper, and I realize she looks like a meerkat. I’m about to say that out loud, but Sarah starts to cry, and I’ve never seen Sarah cry, not even when her dad left, and she says, “I don’t want my mom to die,” and Chrissy keeps pulling her socks up and pushing them down, and I realize it’s going to be on me to pull our shit together.
“We’ll be fine if our moms die,” I say, “We’re already self-sufficient.”
“No we’re not,” says Sarah. Turns out she looks just like her mom when she cries, which is weird, since Sarah is way taller and we all know she looks exactly like her dad, the douchebag. “How the fuck would we pay for shit? How’re we going to get places?” She hands me the pipe and the lighter. I take a hit and pass it on to Chrissy, who stops with her socks long enough to smoke.
Yesterday dead moms wasn’t even on our radar, but now we know it could happen to any of us, because Amy is the good one, the one who does everything right, and her mom, who’s dead now, who died in her driveway surrounded by little glass jars of expensive yogurt and lemons and probably whole wheat pasta, went to Pilates every day, which we used to make fun of, sure, but we were also like, Jesus, she looks good for a mom. And our moms don’t. Chrissy’s mom’s drunk all the time and Sarah’s mom doesn’t eat and my mom’s too depressed to get out of bed most days to check if her fifteen-year-old daughter’s getting high in her own house. I wonder what they were like at our age, if they sat around in a basement getting high talking shit about their moms. I don’t know about Chrissy and Sarah’s moms, but I can’t picture mine passing a joint and laughing.
“We’ll make a plan,” I say. “In case.”
I figure we can watch Amy and see how she does it, because if anyone can pull off being motherless it will be Amy. She’s always the one of us that makes shit look easy, but not in an annoying way, not in a way that makes you want to punch her in the kidney or cut her hair while she’s sleeping or stop going to her house after school every day. She just kind of floats over shit, like she’s put together and light and bounceable in a way that makes us feel that way too. She’s just like her mom.
“I always thought it’d be my mom,” Sarah says, and I don’t argue. Sarah went to live with her uncle for six weeks last year because her mom wouldn’t eat anything but cucumbers and rice crackers. We found her passed out at the bottom of the stairs one day after school with a knife in her hand and no clothes on. We called Amy’s mom and she came right over without even asking any questions, like she knew exactly what to do and who to call and how to get Sarah to let go of her mom’s arm long enough to get her in the ambulance.
I Google meerkats and it’s uncanny how much they look like Chrissy, with their dark, wide eyes and their skinny arms and the way they look around like they know shit’s about to go down, like they’re ready for it. Chrissy’s whole family look like meerkats, even her step-father. I can picture them all standing on a little hill, their ears twitching, Chrissy’s little brother hiding behind her like he always does, as if that’s going to help.
Sarah passes a bag of Doritos to me. I put the long side of a triangle in my mouth and try to close my lips around the whole thing. Amy’s mom would never buy Doritos. Maybe she’d buy those organic ones, the ones with natural cheese and no preservatives, but probably not. For my birthday last year she made me a chocolate cake from scratch, which Amy must have told her is my favorite, and we sat around her kitchen table and they sang to me and then Amy’s mom told me to make a wish, which I said I did, even though I didn’t, and then we ate cake and drank milk like we were in a fucking dairy commercial. It was amazing.
“We’re lucky,” I say, and I’m about to make up a few reasons why, but Chrissy stops playing with her socks and I think she might say something. Sarah leans towards her so she’ll be able to hear. But Chrissy just reaches for a Dorito. If she did speak, I wish it would be something like, “Are you kidding me right now, Jen? I mean, are you actually fucking kidding me with this lucky shit right now?” I wish Chrissy talked like that. It would be good for her, I think, to get mad, even if it’s just at me.
“What do you think Amy’s doing right now?” I ask, wiping orange cheese on my jeans. I picture her in her bedroom. It’s all soft colors and she has a feather comforter with a Moana duvet cover, which we make fun of, but Amy doesn’t care. She says Moana makes her happy. That’s what she’s like. She doesn’t care if someone makes fun of something as long as it makes her happy. I think she gets that from her mom.
“Probably missing us,” Sarah says, and we all nod, even Chrissy.
“We should probably go see her,” I say. I look at my phone to see if she’s texted, but there’s nothing. “Things’ll be different now,” I say.
If Amy’s mom was still alive we’d be at her house, probably sitting at the kitchen table, and she would be asking us about school and putting out cheese and apples and shit, or pouring us iced tea, the kind with no sugar in it, and we’d be rolling our eyes, but really, we’d be eating it up, all of it, the questions, the cheese, the apple slices, the way she’d rest her hand on our backs as she walked around the table, stopping at each of us as if she knew we just needed someone to touch us, and I would probably be saying something stupid about math class, and Amy would be laughing, and Sarah would be interrupting me every two minutes to say something about some boy, probably Stephen, and Chrissy, well, Chrissy would just be there, not talking because she never talks, but she’d be looking so, safe, I guess, because that’s what Amy’s mom made us all feel. Like she was looking out for us, like maybe we’d actually be okay some day, like maybe we’d grow up to be just fine.
“We’ll be okay,” I say. I reach out slowly to put a hand on Chrissy’s foot and she doesn’t pull away. I pick at a scab on my arm.
Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Variant Lit, Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).
What a terrific story. I love the voice of the narrator.