By Jessica Mohsen-Crellin
The day the storm rained down I saw her, dressed in her Sunday best with her usually perfectly placed lace collar askew and timidly tame pantyhose torn, bringing all the dishes out to the yard to catch the rainwater. There was a weightlessness in her step that was foreign to me as she shrieked with glee and skipped back and forth from the kitchen cabinets through the screen door off the kitchen that opened to the front yard. My sister and I watched from the living room window. My sister, younger than me, with a look of concern, trembled slightly by my side. But as I watched our mother handle the kitchenware with such care and concern, I thought of the way mother held my body when I cried, of how she brushed the tangles out of my hair or pulled the thistles out of my cuts. The next dish my mother brought out was a glass rectangular pan that had contained tuna casserole every Friday night for my entire life. She held it over her head and began to race back and forth. Come on girls, she shouted, we can’t let any get past us. My sister ducked down behind the window, shrinking in her sight, but I saw the lines in my mother’s face usually dragged down under the weight of sagging skin, now lifted by the crook in her smile and raced to my mother’s side. Grabbing a teal ceramic pot with orange rings around the white interior from years of cooking mild chili, I held it over my head. Together we caught the rain drops before they hit the lawn. As each dish filled with water, we threw them over the fence, and I watched as my mother’s eyes came alive as we listened to them shatter.
Jessica Mohsen-Crellin is a fictionist and essayist from Stonewall, Manitoba, Canada. She graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in European Studies in 2018 and later received an MFA in Creative Writing from BYU in 2024. During Fall 2022 and Winter 2023 she worked at Inscape as the Assistant Nonfiction Editor. Her work has previously been published in Inscape Journal and is forthcoming in The Tusculum Review. She currently lives in Utah with her husband and their plants.