Mothers and Other Monsters - Hardcover

Maureen F. McHugh has spent most of her life in Ohio, but has lived in New York City and, for a year, in Shijiazhuang, China. She is the author of four novels. Her first novel, China Mountain Zhang, won the Tiptree Award and her latest novel, Nekropolis, was a Book Sense 76 pick and New York Times Editor's Choice.

Wicked: The first thing that burst into flame was a bag of groceries in the back of the Explorer. Taking groceries in the house was a moment she joked about with the cashier at the grocery store. The grocery store nearest her house was a little upscale, a little chichi and when she shopped there instead of the less expensive Kroger s, she knew it was another moral lapse. But she liked to get shopping over with as fast as possible so she mostly shopped at the expensive place. The bag boys loaded the groceries in the car for the customers and as Joe was bagging, she said, Could you come home and put them away for me Joe, who was still in high school, just laughed. But she really hated putting groceries away. Picking them was ripe with possibility. Putting them away was like cleaning up after the party. Joyless. She opened the back of the SUV and saw the pile of bags and felt the creeping edge of despair. She just stood there, looking, and then a curl of smoke drifted up past the box of Life cereal, and suddenly, instead of a bag of cereal and macaroni and cheese, it was a bag of flame. It was gorgeous. And her heart warmed to it. She felt nothing but pleasure for a moment and then she thought distantly that she should pull the bag out. But she didn t. Instead she just watched the next bag of groceries onions, red bell peppers and portabella mushrooms catch. Upscale groceries double bag, and the outer plastic sack melted, then blackened. The back of the seat caught, too, heavy black smoke, stinking and acrid with chemicals. She backed out of the garage. Would the car explode But it didn t. It burned flamboyantly, the flames flattening against the ceiling of the garage. The next door neighbor shouted, I ll call 911! She hadn t even noticed that the neighbor had come out. Let it burn, she thought. She looked at the mailbox down by the street and in a moment, smoke leaked around the opening, and then the top of the post flared, fire almost invisible in the daylight. The garage was engulfed and she could see smoke behind the windows in the front of the house. Her husband was at work. Her kids were at school. Wouldn t they be surprised Who was going to clean this up Not me, she thought.