Maybum
by Mary B. Sellers

The frost isn’t as pretty as I expected it to be. Out here with the dogs. 6:29 am. 

Parents have gone because mom’s getting another electroconvulsive treatment and for the first time in a long time I’m glad she’s going. It usually bothers me to think about all her neurons being lit up like little glow in the dark worms and her mouth clamped shut so she won’t swallow her tongue. I asked her once how the doctor knows she’s seizing; she told me that he watches for when her foot “jumps”. She couldn’t remember whether it was her right or her left. But her dad is dying; an event that would unravel even the most raveled of us. I haven’t had that happen yet, but I got a taste of what it would potentially feel like back in 2014. My own dad. Cancers. One so bad the medical people in charge of naming medical things felt compelled to place a modifier before it: malignant. 

Men In the Moon
by Mary B. Sellers

Angry velvet air and a curved comb of a moon—its mannish features tonight are fine-toothed and ashy, like the fresh outline of an elbow bruise. Ever since I was little people have told me he’s smiling up there—a not-quite-father-figure, presumably kind and probably old—but I can’t help wondering about his penis size or whether moon entities are even allowed those. I’ve never quite believed them, though. To me, he’s only a watchful stranger, vague as a ghost, constant as a headache. Just another man playing god for twelve hour shifts, like he owns the place, like he has some right to it. If the stars were a diner, he’d be their owner.