– Fiction by Ellen Stearns –
Featured in Issue 22 of Dreamers Magazine and winner of the 2026 Pen Parentis Fellowship!
Mom died on Tuesday. On Friday she returned. I slept until eleven that day (it had been increasingly hard to get out of bed). When I finally shuffled into the kitchen, I saw her. She looked like an ice statue, the kind I had seen carved by a man with a chainsaw at the Winter Festival when I was nine. He had transformed giant blocks of ice into sparkling swans. But this ice statue was my mother, and she was sitting at my worn dinette set three days after her death.
“Mom?” I croaked.
She turned her face toward me. The deep lines on either side of her nose, her wispy hair, her drooping earlobes: all of it was rendered in colorless crystalline detail. She smiled but did not speak. A drop of water gathered at the end of her nose and dripped onto the linoleum. She was melting.
I shoved open the window above the kitchen sink. A gust of January wind burst into the room. I ran to the sliding glass door and threw it open as well. A small pile of snow that had drifted against the door tumbled into the kitchen. I left a footprint in the powder as I rushed to the thermostat, setting it as low as it would go.
I put on three sweaters, two pairs of pants, gloves, snow boots, and my warmest coat. I wrapped myself in a quilt. It wasn’t enough. The cold seeped through the layers bit by bit. Mom stopped melting as I began to freeze.
I said all the things I wish I’d said. She remained silent, but sometimes she’d smile or nod. I lost feeling in my fingers and toes.
My sister came to check on me and found us still at the table. I shivered. My lips were blue. “She can’t stay,” my sister said, gentle and absolute. Together, we led Mom outside, across the parking lot, to the edge of the silent, snowy woods. We watched her walk into the forest. One last glint of her—bright—and then gone.
About the Author – Ellen Stearns
Ellen Stearns is a writer and the 2026 Pen Parentis Writing Fellow. Her award-winning fiction has been internationally published and described as “touching and intimate, yet breaking the bounds of reality.” She lives in New York.
Meanwhile, at Dreamers…
Last chance! Stories of Place, Home, and the Meaning of Dreaming
The deadline for the Dreamers Writing Contest on place and home is January 31. Submit a heartfelt story, poem, or essay reflecting on belonging, memory, displacement, or the meaning of home. Open internationally. $250 CAD prize and publication.
Editor’s Note: Issues 21 and 22
We’re pleased to announce the simultaneous release of Dreamers Magazine Issues 21 and 22.These two issues were shaped during very different moments…