How to Turn Your Dead Grandmother into a Bird

By Beth Sherman

Grab the urn with her ashes that’s been sitting on your mantel for nine long days. Pour out half a cup. Mix with the broth for her Whatever Ails You soup, stirring in chopped carrots, celery, chickpeas, minced onions and a teaspoon of fresh oregano. Add a few dust motes plucked from the air and the memory of her laugh. Take her favorite dress, the one with brown violets, and zip yourself into it. Get her old diaries, jammed in a plastic Shop Rite bag with a bunch of hair curlers and rusty clips. Read quickly while stirring, the words drifting into your head like an outside breeze, before the window slams shut. Imagine her as a child: Corkscrew curls. Smock dress. Eager expression. Remember when you were little and she brought you treasures – a pin cushion, a dachshund figurine, a lavender sachet, a baggy filled with buttons. Imagine her as a wife: Fretful. Mopping floors. Smoking. Tell her ghost – the veiled specter who’s been pacing the attic each night, keening, that heaven is only a cloud or three away. Taste the broth. Add salt. Keep stirring. Pour the hot soup into your favorite mug. Go into the backyard, where she used to like to sit, breathing “country air,” telling you how beautiful life is, how she refuses to leave it. Imagine her in the county nursing home: Crying. Fearful. Calling you by a different name. Pour the soup in a cracked plastic saucer. Sprinkle in birdseed. Watch them arrive: robins and bluejays, sparrows and wrens, a wing, a beak, a claw, an ending.    

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Beth Sherman’s novella-in-flash, How to Get There from Here, will be published in July 2026 by Ad Hoc Fiction. She has had more than 250 stories featured in literary journals, including Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream, Bending Genres and Smokelong Quarterly, where she’s a Submissions Editor. Her work appears in Best Microfiction 2024 and 2026 and Best Small Fictions 2025. The author of five mystery novels, she can be reached on social media @bsherm36.