 A Web Chapbook from The Literary Review
Maureen E. O'Neill
Did you sit in the backseat, your face touching his, your tears on his closed eyelids, ear to his lips, checking, was he still - ? Lifting his arm, shaking it. If you could just keep him moving, not let him go to sleep. Twisting around, spewing out your frustration over the grinding cloud of traffic ahead, looking for flashing lights, desperate now to ride within their pulsing embrace.
Did some faceless robed person outside the emergency room hail you down and with brutal concern grab Colin out of his car seat?
Leaving you behind, alone. The way a mother of a four-month-old is never alone.
from "A Coiled Pot"
Maureen E. O'Neill was born in Washington, D.C. in 1953. She graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English Literature from Cornell University and earned a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where she worked in the legal aid clinic and was a member of the law review. She practiced corporate and securities law in Philadelphia until the birth of her first child in 1985. O'Neill gradually turned to fiction after years of journal writing, and her first published short story, "Broken," appeared in the Winter 1997 issue of The Literary Review. O'Neill lives with her husband and two children in Pennington, New Jersey.
Maureen E. O'Neill, from Cast-Iron
Gingerbread became the tag that identified Gwen Miller and the theme for all gifts. Without ever intending to, Gwen became a collector of gingerbread house artifacts. As a result, her house gave the impression of a small gift boutique forced to specialize in a single motif in order to stand out in a competitive market. Near Christmas, the hundreds of gingerbread house tree ornaments were on display. But on any day of the year, there were coffee tables burdened with slick books featuring award-winning gingerbread houses, walls covered with Hansel and Gretel lithographs and couches strewn with witch puppets and hand-woven candy canes. Even Gwen Miller's very person was not exempt: papier-mâché gingerbread children dangled from her ears and leaden ceramic cottages weighed down her hand-knit sweaters.
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