Solstice
I hadn’t let my mother near a stove in months. Not since she was forced to move in with me. Dinner was usually anything I could microwave – frozen burritos, mac & cheese, fettucine Alfredo, single-serve pizzas. I’ve never been all that interested in cooking and I didn’t have time for it, between working and taking care of her.
Let’s make meatloaf, she announced one morning.
I loved my mother’s meatloaf. Savory, moist. It didn’t dry out in the oven or fall apart on the fork. The last time I’d eaten it my father was still alive.
She’d gotten dressed, combed her hair. It had all the makings of a blue-sky day.
I would love to make meatloaf.
The recipe directions were in a worn wooden box decorated with drawings of smiling salt and pepper shakers. After phoning in sick again, I drove her to Shop Rite.
The store had just opened and was nearly empty. We breezed down the aisles, tossing ingredients in our cart. She made small talk with the check-out girl, played peekaboo with a baby in a stroller. Maybe she was better. Maybe this would last.
Back home, she let me tie an apron around her waist. I chopped the celery and garlic, measured out ketchup, Dijon mustard, brown sugar, soy sauce, milk.
My secret ingredient, she said triumphantly, shaking a package of gelatin.
How did you think of using it?
I was making Jell-o and had some left over.
She stirred the mixture with a spatula briskly before I poured it in a loaf pan.
Tonight is the Summer Solstice, I said.
Solstice, she repeated. Sol for sun. Stice for stop. Sun standing still.
I can’t believe you had to take Latin in school.
Such a beautiful language. No one speaks it anymore.
Sitting in my kitchen, with sunlight drifting through the window, I was reminded of all the times I’d watched her prepare meals while I did my homework and she told me about growing up in the Bronx.
Could you tell me a story?
She had lots of them. The one where she got stuck atop a Ferris wheel. The time she found an organdy dress in the trash and wore it to a dance. The one where she was dating my father’s best friend and fell in love with my father instead. Some of the details were off. She called my grandmother by the wrong first name, couldn’t remember where she went to high school, claimed she never had a brother. But the gist was the same.
When the timer rang, she clapped her hands. Hurrah, she exclaimed. I’m hungry.
You want to eat now?
It was ten thirty in the morning.
Our dinner will get cold.
I took out plates, silverware, napkins.
Later, the earth would tilt on its axis, stretching toward the sun on the longest day of the year. Now I took a bite of meatloaf, watched my mother chew. For one blue-sky moment, we were aligned.
Things Found in My Father’s Bedroom After the Funeral
A pair of Vortex Optics Crossfire binoculars. Waterproof, fog proof, shockproof.
His life list, tucked in the back of Peterson’s A Field Guide to the Birds, with each species he saw neatly crossed off.
A letter from me, age eight, written at Camp Flowerdale, asking that he take me home immediately. I hate it here. We had hot dogs for lunch. I saw a snowy ibis.
A bedraggled peacock feather.
A photo of the two of us at Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, the day we spotted a sandhill crane for the first time, our smiles bright as a promise.
A picture of him and my mother at the beach, posing in front of a flamingo sand sculpture, nine years before she left us.
A letter he received from her detailing his many faults. You’re selfish and stubborn. Closed off. Insensitive.
A half-empty bottle of Valium.
Drugs used to fight pancreatic cancer whose names – Afinitor, Xeloda, Zortress – sound like female superheroes.
197 scratched-off Mega Millions lottery tickets.
An essay he wrote in ninth grade called “My Philosophy of Life,” which received a grade of C plus. You neglect to cite where you got your ideas. The point of the assignment wasn’t to merely make things up.
A chipped mug shaped like a raven.
A dusty deck of Woodpecker Trivia cards.
A packet of letters with duck stamps, return address Del Ray Beach, from a man named John Westin, whose existence was as cryptic as the birds we once struggled to identify, studying their wing bars and eye strips, the shape of their tails, You ground me, John Westin wrote, you’re my everything.
A list of New Year’s Resolutions. Go skydiving. See a purple gallinule. Live more freely.
A crumpled fortune cookie slip. There is always something left to love.
Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 200 literary magazines, including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. She’s a submissions editor at Smokelong Quarterly and the winner of Smokelong’s 2024 Workshop prize. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and the upcoming Best Small Fictions 2025. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36.
January House Literary Journal 
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