Review: My Mother's Ashes

My Mother's Ashes by Elaine Chiew
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This story is available online at https://lost-balloon.com/2018/04/25/m...

I had to look up the word "columbarium " which is "a room or building with niches for funeral urns to be stored."

This is a story of mothers & daughters, a relationship which can have difficulties, especially with those persistent, insistent mothers who "demonstrated the art of the quicksilver word (your simian children) and the wounding minute gesture (the elegant shift of the body away from speaker mid-sentence)"

Another good story, although I thought it rushed in parts - but that may be this reader - but I loved the ending which I didn't see coming.

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Variations on a theme by A.L. Kennedy

A.L. Kennedy wrote an extremely short story “He didn’t. She did. Big Mistake” (1)

Here are my “Variations on a theme by A.L. Kennedy”

He didn’t. She didn’t. Big mistake.
He didn’t. She didn’t. Another baby.
He didn’t. She didn’t. Conception imminent.
He didn’t. She did. Never knew
He did. She didn’t . Conception foiled.
He did. She did. Belt ‘n’ Braces.

© Sheila Ash, 30th October 2017

(1 ) Microfiction at The University of Essex, see No. 28 https://www1.essex.ac.uk/ldev/documents/microfiction/examples.pdf

The last word

We didn’t realise till too late. The rise in doctor’s visits was probably the first sign, more complaints of tiredness put down to rat-race stress. The rises in early onset dementia, in early menopause, noticed but unexplained. McPherson’s article on the epidemiology of progeroid syndromes was missed outside a small circle of academics. The tabloids only got the story when their own staff succumbed. World governments had already sequestered scientists to find cause and cure but they too succumbed before much headway was made. No time for panic to set in as the problem spiralled exponentially out of control. Children born on Monday were adult by Saturday and dead in the week. Reproduction all but ceased, the fabric of society as our grandfathers had known disintegrated in the increasingly frantic scramble to eat and procreate. My child will be born today. I won’t hear its cry, humanity’s final word.

150 words