By Dawn Tasaka Steffler
Recently, when they leave the house, they sneak out, even in the middle of the day. And I know why; they don’t want me to see them wearing the cropped, lilac tank top and cutoff jean shorts I will find later in the clothes hamper. At some point, I notice how still the 
house is, and I’ll stop whatever I’m doing – the bills, the dishes, the TV – to look for him, but he’s gone. Oh crap, I did it again. They get so angry when I slip up, especially in front of people. They think I don’t care. I wish they could inhabit my brain when it happens: they look the same, talk the same, gesture the same. Until I slip, and they scowl, and my tongue stumbles, and my brain struggles to recalibrate, and my heart sighs. I give them space. I’m waiting for them to take the lead. Because I don’t want to make things any more challenging than they already are. I don’t know what questions to ask. For the first time as a mother, I don’t know how to fix this. And they’re probably interpreting my silence the wrong way. But what they don’t understand is, I see them: the grace of their fledgling arms, how they play with their hair now that it’s longer, tucking it behind their ears or twirling strands with a finger, and how, when they’re relaxed and happy, they lean back in their chair, and their ankles twine around each other.
Dawn Tasaka Steffler is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, winner of the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and selected for the Wigleaf Top 50 long list. Her most recent stories appear in Fractured Lit, Atlas and Alice, In Short: A Journal of Flash Nonfiction, and are forthcoming in Moon City Review and The Forge. She is working on a collection that explores the challenges and joys of parenting queer kids. Find her online at dawntasakasteffler.com and on X, BlueSky and Instagram @dawnsteffler
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