Mom-Bridge
By M.C. Schmidt
When Mom died, we captured her soul in a jar. It wasn’t impulsive, since we’d discussed it previously, and sterilized the jar. Still, in the moment, it felt like instinct. We smuggled it out of the hospice inside one of her slip-ons.
None of us spoke on the drive home. The vibe in the car was like we were a crew of thieves, hoping to evade attention as we escaped a heist. It wouldn’t have shocked us if the night sky suddenly brightened, a helicopter spotlight encircling our sedan, black-clad government agents repelling into our laps through windows they shattered with their boots. Nothing like that happened, though. There’s no law against detaining your mother’s soul. We arrived home with the jar on the floorboard, safely standing between my brother’s feet.
We were exhausted from weeks at her bedside, and needed rest. Dad tucked her behind the sugar and flour cannisters so the cat wouldn’t bat her off the counter. (We’d decided on a glass pickle jar due to concerns about synthetic estrogen in plastics).
Mom’s luminescence gave us the idea of digging the projector out of the garage. We would walk into the kitchen thinking we’d forgotten to turn off the light and find it was Mom’s jar, lit so brightly that you couldn’t look directly at her.
The projector was the old style with a carousel for film slides. The jar fit perfectly in the carousel’s center. We slid her in, and Mom’s silhouette instantly danced across the wallpaper. It wore her favorite long cardigan, like how ghosts present in their civil war uniforms or ethereal gowns, even though they should rightfully be naked.
I was the first to notice that she could slide along the walls outside the scope of the projector’s lens. She moved from room to room even, maneuvering herself to the opposite side of the house from where the projector was pointed. Since she couldn’t speak, she became skilled at communicating with her body—gesturing, contorting herself into shadow animals of exquisite detail, even accurately emulating us as we moved through the house. I pushed my bed against the wall so she could see me off to sleep. The others did the same. There was no physical sensation of her when she patted your head goodnight, or when you pressed your body against the wall for a hug. She carried a smell, though, of brine and burning garage dust. We wouldn’t take her for granted this time, we vowed, not like we had when she was alive.
The neighbors loved her. They would stand with Dad, staring at the wall, laughing as Mom danced, or made her hand into the sharp angles of a martini glass and pretended to drink. Mr. Samson, whose wife had long been battling some chronic thing, took comfort in her, declaring that he had a half-empty kimchi jar in his fridge for whenever the time came. Mom gave him a tsk-tsk waggle of her finger, but we laughed it off. It was known that Mom didn’t care for Mrs. Samson, having once summed her up as, “Five rats stacked in an asshole costume.” We reasoned that she didn’t want to share her post-death glory.
In time, her novelty wore off. Still, we kept the projector running, told her we loved her whenever we left for work or school, and made do with the awkward arrangement of furniture that we’d moved toward or away from the wall to accommodate her.
In May, Mrs. Samson died. Dad declined her husband’s offer to bring his jar for a visit with Mom. Soon, a trend started, spread by word of mouth. The listicle, How to Keep Your Mother With You Forever, went viral. As the phenomenon spread, Mom grew lackadaisical, her light dim, her shadow faint. Whenever one of us thought to bring it up, the others shrugged and said it was Mom, that she’d figure it out like she always had.
One summer night, a boy I grew up with crashed his car and died on the suspension bridge leaving downtown—Widow’s Bridge, they called it, from all the lives it had taken. He’d moved away years before, so I wasn’t terribly bothered. Mom took it harder. She’d known his mother. She blinked off and on, rattled the projector’s carousel, raged silently on the walls. The house stank of brine.
“We need to do something about Mom,” Dad said.
We decided to take her to the bridge, hoping to give her closure. We carried her to the little cross with his photo, set Mom down beside it, and spoke kindnesses. A woman joined us just as we were readying to leave. It was the boy’s mother, we realized—older, thinner, grief-weary. In her arms she held a mason jar. “His grandmother,” she told us. “He was her favorite.” She set the grandmother beside Mom and wept. We were ineffectual, unsure, apologetic when we said we must be going.
Dad tried to lift Mom, and her light intensified, heating the glass so that he had to pull his hand away. We stood, reasoning with her, but she refused to hear us. What choice was there but to leave her?
Years have passed, and I’m a parent. I question if we were wrong to capture her soul only to abandon it on that bridge. She has plenty of company, though. The trend has shifted from keeping your mother forever to finding humane ways to dispose of a sentimental jar. There are hundreds of them—lined up, stacked three deep and just as high—lighting the bridge at night, dead moms keeping drivers safe.
I tell my kids that grandma is a hero. They ask to see her, but I rarely get to that side of town. I sometimes wonder if she’s content, or worry that she’s in distress. Then, I remind myself that if there’s a problem, she’ll sort it out. After all, this is Mom we’re talking about.
About the Author
M.C. Schmidt's recent short fiction has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Southern Humanities Review, EVENT, Coolest American Stories 2024, and elsewhere. He is the author of the novel, The Decadents (Library Tales Publishing, 2022) and the forthcoming short story collection, How to Steal a Train (Anxiety Press, 2025). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University.
