Tough Mothers

By Sue Star

Three Short Stories

A Mother's Link Is Never Done:  It's tough replacing a mother.

Babysitting Earth:  Should she protect the earth or protect her child?

The Growing Ponds:  Can the next generation really be grown in ponds?

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. M. Kreg Publishing
• Release date: Nov 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540133540

Sue Star

Sue Star writes mysteries about families in chaos. In her leisure time, she enjoys hiking, skiing, martial arts, and hanging out with her family.  Murder in the Dojo, Murder with Altitude and Murder for a Cash Crop are the first three books  of her Nell Letterly series, about a single mom who solves murders and tries to avoid being a suspect in Boulder, Colorado. She also has two collections of mystery stories, Organized Death and Trophy Hunting.   Soon to be released, Trouble in a Politically Correct Town will feature short stories about Nell’s friends.  

Book preview

Tough Mothers

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Three Stories

By

Rebecca S. W. Bates

Electronic edition published by D. M. Kreg Publishing, July 2012.

Copyright © 2012 by D. M. Kreg Publishing and Rebecca S. W. Bates.

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Cover Art:  Tish Marti and Dreamstime

Table of Contents

A Mother's Link Is Never Done:  It's tough replacing a mother.

Babysitting Earth:  Should she protect the earth or protect her child?

The Growing Ponds:  Can the next generation really be grown in ponds?

A Mother’s Link Is Never Done

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The least I could do for Aleris was to mother her, now that I’d killed her last mother.  Why couldn’t Dr. Sidra understand that? 

Oh, the look Aleris gave me! I cried out, struggling with my hammock.  Hated the damn thing.  It could’ve been my own Phillipa staring at me. 

Dr. Sidra liked to hold our sessions here in the center of spacehab — in freefall — something about being conducive to free thought, but for me, it was a damned nuisance trying to keep my limbs from floating apart in four different directions.  I wanted more control. 

Go on, Doc said, nodding.  Her red hair streamed about her face like the petals of a starflower.  Tell me more about your daughter.  You still miss her, don’t you? 

You know it, I said, but then I thought:  what could be worse than losing an only child except, maybe, for a child to lose an only parent? 

We’re here to talk about your daughter.  Phillipa.  Not Aleris.  Dr. Sidra was always doing that — trying to confuse me. 

So I ignored her re-direction and plowed on.  See, I figured any orphaned child younger than Aleris would’ve been assigned to a new family unit, but not her, not a child-woman about to matriculate.  No one was going to take her that late, and so I got to. 

The doc sighed.  She has other parents, doesn’t she?  But Doc was linked in.  Doc knew all of the answers to all of her questions. 

So I didn’t have to answer anything stupid like that.  I know what it means to be all alone.  I got no one left, either. 

What I suggested, Doc said cautiously, was that you become acquainted with Aleris, become friendly with her.  Have you done that yet? 

Well, no, I said.  I’ve never actually met her.  Not personally, that is. 

How do you think that what you’re doing — your concern for her — how is that helping to accomplish your goal of mother-friending her? 

Doc was a Thinker, and Thinkers usually tried to tell us Workers that we were wrong.  Thinkers sure could be dense.  I sighed and explained it one more time.  Ever since I lost my little Phillipa, nothing has seemed to matter anymore.  What good is it to have a child only to lose her to another mother?  And then that replacement mother lets her get sick and...and...  I couldn’t say the word.  Die.  I had to close my eyes to keep my tears from glomming.  Was this how Aleris felt? 

I sniffed and went on.  "Two lost souls — that’s what we are, Aleris and me.  We