story: “Fire Horse”

author: Karen Shepard

year: 2017

where: Home, in bed

note: I love this story, though I hesitate to call it one story. It feels like two stories about the same characters. Margaret Atwood has two stories like that in Bluebeard’s Egg, but she chose to split them into two titles and group them beside each other.

a line: “Weeks before we left New York, my grandmother had told me over the phone from her apartment in Paris that it was only a matter of time before my mother would lose interest in me, now that I was grown up.”

theme(s): Families, siblings, mothers and daughters, heritage, love