I suspect my grandmother has moved into her next form. I can hear the spirits of my Dad and others that have passed, but I think Grandma is larking about as a toddler at this point. Maybe even riding a bike without training wheels, it’s been that long.

She was always a quiet spirit. Her strongest visit was right after she died, when my bedroom turned so suddenly chilly, it seemed like my gooseflesh was going to permanently raise scales along my arms. She toned it down quite a bit after that.

But now? I feel her in memory, but it’s not the insistence of a fresh message. It’s not the invisible hand on your back.

Can an ancestor quit their job as a guide or counselor? Could you (I mean, me— I mean, one of my cousins probably) do something so egregiously stupid that they say, I’m so done, I’m going back as a baby.

Or do we just age out of the system?

I suspect my youngest daughter is “of” Grandma. Maybe not Grandma herself, but from that lineage of spirit. This feels right in a way that is not scientifically provable. But so much about being a mother is biologically miraculous; why not embrace the inherently witchy parts of it?

I like the idea of mothering a spirit that has mothered prior. I like that we are all the roles to all the people, and they are all the roles to us.

I am a parent because you are a child. I am a child because you are a parent.

FFO’s May 2025 issue explores this ouroboros. The birth, death, rebirth of it all. The parenting of each other—whether good or bad. The shepherding of each other from the unknown realms of the before to the unknown realms of after.

We start with a mother that can’t accept her child—in life or death—in the stunningly chilling science fiction story, “Robot, Changeling, Ghost” by Avra Margariti.

In Nicole Lynn’s story, “Entropy in a Fruit Bowl,” the power of resurrection changes and resuscitates a friendship over and over until it’s unrecognizable.

In time for Mother’s Day in the U.S., we have a fast-paced escape on the back of a mama spider in Brandon Case’s “Eight Legs of the Mother Hunted.”

This is followed by a literary piece on how a woman’s role as a mother can obscure her identity in “To Be a Woman Is to Be Without a Name,” by Chidera Solomon Anikpe.

Sam W. Pisciotta flips the script on a seance in “Transubstantiation.” And LeeAnn Perry describes a teenage slumber party around a Ouija Board from the point of view of a ghost in “Yes, No, Goodbye.”

Finally, we close this issue the way we began—with a child in need. In “Sour Milk,” by Phoenix Mendoza, what lurks in the barn is a mother all right, just perhaps not the one we might want.

Thank you for reading! Sharing these stories with friends and families is as easy as sharing a link to our website. While subscribers get the ebook at the beginning of the month, each story has their own release day on our website. Follow along and share your favorites!

* * *

Ⓒ Rebecca Halsey