Dear Mother

by Marzia Rahman

When you are no longer here, I found slices of history and a few features in your room. I never knew you had a bird. I think about you all the time: how you lost yourself bit by bit, a little every day until one day there was nothing left of you! It hurts so much; it keeps hurting even when I am happy and smiling and not worrying. I sit on your bed, though the bedcovers have been washed and ironed, your smell lingers. And I let myself utter the words: I miss you mother, but it sounds redundant now; and I can’t remember whether regret is a verb or a noun.

6S

Marzia Rahman is a Bangladeshi writer and translator. Her flashes have appeared in 101 Words, Postcard Shorts, Five of the Fifth, The Voices Project, Fewerthan500.com, WordCity Literary Journal, Red Fern Review, Dribble Drabble Review, Paragraph Planet, Six Sentences, Academy of the Heart and Mind, Potato Soup Journal, Borderless Journal, The Antonym, Flash Fiction Festival Four and Writing Places Anthology UK. Her novella-in-flash If Dreams had wings and Houses were built on clouds was longlisted in the Bath Novella in Flash Award Competition in 2022. She is also a painter.