Louella Lester
We Always Laughed Through Pain
Dad called to say he’d spread Mom’s cremated remains. She wanted them spread in a remote birch grove, but she died in winter and Dad had agreed to wait until the snow melted, so I asked how he managed to walk in there. He ignored my question and said, I kept back a third in the closet, but he never explained where the rest actually went. Dad died a few months later, and as we spread him, and a third of Mom, in the birch grove alongside a deer path, I thought maybe that was as much of her that he felt he could handle for eternity. I pictured them becoming salt lick for deer that would then make their way to the unknown spot where the rest of Mom lay. Maybe Mom would have the last laugh as the deer deposited them together, forever.
Louella Lester is a writer/photographer in Winnipeg, Canada, author of Glass Bricks (a quirky CNF work memoir-in-flash), a contributing editor at New Flash Fiction Review, and is included in Best Microfiction 2024 & 2026. Her writing and/or photography appears in a variety of journals, including Bending Genres, Blood+Honey, Dog Throat, Fictive Dream, Gooseberry Pie, Hot Flash Lit, Mad Swirl, Neither Fish Nor Foul, Odd Magazine, and Rawhead.
