While My Mother Dreams of Judge Judy

by Tina Barry

I dream, too. In this dream, Judy’s rage ruffles the quiet cut-outs of her collar. Madame! she shouts at the teen mother whose boyfriend’s Pitbull bites. First it was the boyfriend and his infected tattoo. Then his five kids. Then the biting dog. My mother’s telling Judy about her girlhood mutt, Shadow, a dark cannonball rolling across the dim light of memory. I see her patent leather shoes, round-toed, pumping, as she chases Shadow over hills and onto someone’s picnic feast, one paw deep in the center of a chocolate cake, a fried chicken leg clamped in his jaw. He should have been on a leash! Judy says. Their laughter pocks lilac trees that open and bloom. I’m old now; mother’s my child, just like real life. Our home, many homes before, teeters, a teacup on the saucer of the lawn. Her bed, pale blue in the haze, yawns wide. Buy me a dog, she says, reaching for me in our long-ago kitchen.

This micro appeared in Nixes Mate’s Spring 2021 issue and the Nixes Mate Review Anthology: In the Time of Covid 2021.

Tina Barry is the author of Beautiful Raft (Big Table Publishing, 2019) and Mall Flower Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2016). Her writing can be found in The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, Trampset,Bending Genres, Unbroken, Gone Lawn, The Maryland Literary Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, Flash-Frontier, Bull City Press and elsewhere.Tina is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and has several Best of the Net nods. She is a teaching artist at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.