'Familiar' by J. Robert Lennon

When Elisa is driving home from her annual visit to the grave of her son, she suddenly finds herself in different clothes and in a different car. The life awaiting her is different: her son hasn’t died, his brother has grown up differently, her relationship with her husband is different. Is this what she has longed for, for her son not to have died? Elisa bears the knowledge that her son has ‘really’ died, and so she cannot fit authentically into the space this life has reserved for her – or is her belief that her son has died a form of mental derangement, symptomatic of her repressed hatred of the role of wife and mother? This is a compelling and unnerving interrogation of the ambivalences of parenting and the fraught constructs of identity.

(December 2014)