My mom and I are watching TV, and I’m like, I don’t know, six, seven maybe? We’re in this little apartment with train tracks nearby & the trains shake us awake every three a.m. Through the grimy window I can see a row of ants or mites or something marching along the side of the building.
This is before she met my stepdad and we had anything like money.
It’s the 80s so the TV’s got a pair of rabbit ears and a line of static right through Murphy Brown’s eyes, and no remote. (Well, I’m the remote). We’re two peas in a pod, me and my mom, cross-legged with open books on our knees because there’s no such thing as fast-forwarding through the commercials yet. I’ve got a Sweet Valley book with a blonde girl on the cover named Elizabeth – like the Queen, or like Ms. Taylor who played the Queen. Elizabeth-in-the-book has a twin & a big brother & two parents & a split-level ranch in California; she’s basically a princess. Or an alien. I pretend my middle name is Elizabeth, which it almost was, if my mom hadn’t lost that argument too.
My mom’s reading a book I’m not old enough for, the cover black with a white chalk outline of a body, her feet up on the coffee table. The sitcom comes back on, and Murphy Brown stumbles around, being frazzled in her big clean house, in her jacket with the shoulder pads. My mom’s got a jacket like that; she stitched the shoulders in herself, but it’s a dark blue while Murphy’s is yellow with gold buttons.
My mom studies this show as though there’s going to be a test. I don’t know why. Sweet Valley, Murphy Brown – no one lives that way. For example, none of these fictional people read books. They’re always off doing things. I guess that’s the difference: when you have money, you can gas up the car and drive away, but the rest of us are stuck here, on this old brown couch in this old grey building with the bugs sweeping up and down next to the rain gutters, and we just have to make it all up.
Kimberly Glanzman was a finalist for the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and a 2020 Pushcart Nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sky Island Journal, Sleet Magazine, Stonecoast Review, Jet Fuel Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, Blind Corner Literary, South Dakota Review, Harpur Palate, Iron Horse Literary Review, perhappened, and Electric Lit, among others.