The Centifictionist

I keep an imaginary family inside my mind. My father is a professor of linguistics who taught us three languages. My mother grows lilacs and lavender and likes to sketch birds. Every year we meet in a distant land. We dress in bold silk scarves, eat exotic foods, speak snippets of the language. The spice sellers turn as my mother sashays through their markets. We laugh all the time; we never run out of words. This year we are in Bali. Look – they say to the strangers we meet in the rice paddy – This is our beautiful, imaginary daughter.

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Donna Obeid’s work appears in The Baltimore Review, Carve, Flash Fiction Magazine, Hawai`i Pacific Review, New Flash Fiction Review, South 85 Journal, and elsewhere. Her stories have been commended by judges and selected as a finalist for: the Julia Peterkin Literary Award, the New Flash Fiction Prize, Raymond Carver Short Story Contest, and Seventeen’s Fiction Contest. She has received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. She lives and works in Northern California. Read more at: donnaobeid.com and @donnaowrites.