Author: ranneycampbell

Out of the corner her attention through and beyond the mud room to the patio carrying a laundry basket filled of fluffy squares on her hip paused when spotted the pretty girl, who three years earlier had slipped her vaginal canal and was whisked away covered in feces, such a delicate beaming, “Look mom. We’re painting. Like you,” long wooden handled camel hair in a fist like an icepick, scrubbing the hundred- and twenty-dollar fan brush it took ten weeks to save for a decade before, completing the collection, then to her son, he four, with another, sweeping it back and forth in a quarter inch of silt washed underneath the retaining wall as wet in a thunderstorm dried over weeks as there was no time yet to sweep, and her eyes went high to a shelf where she had stashed the cylindric tin she propped her brushes in since she was a teenager given to her by her grandmother that she thought she might take down again someday put there on the day she found the boy in acrylics and after she threw squished tubes away and spent hours cleaning colors from carpeting, but the tin was on its side and every other kind of her brushes lay frayed out there too and she had had violent thoughts in the past but nothing like the electrical chemical hormonal flood that day and in her head who are these people and why are they in my life screamed along with flashes of ripping their flawless arms off pummeling their perfect faces into red pulp so she pulled deep and closed her eyes and silently chanted instead I am not an artist. I am a mother. I am not an artist. I am a mother over and over until another kind of biochemistry came and when all the squares of neatly folded tiny clothes were tucked orderly into drawers folded up her easel and leaned it out of the way and called the city to find out when was the next big-trash-day.

Originally published by Pinyon , summer 2024.

Photo credit: Ranney Campbell, 2025.