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.
Bernice Holtzman’s paintings and collages have
appeared in shows at various venues in Manhattan, including
the Back Fence in Greenwich Village, the Producer’s Club, the Black Door Gallery
on W. 26th St., and one other place she can’t remember, but it was in
a basement, and she was well received.
