When I was writing my young-adult short-story collection, Killing Miss Kitty and Other Sins, I couldn’t quite decide whether I was writing memoir or fiction. Sometimes what I wrote was authentically memoir, but the longer, more shaped pieces tended toward fiction. Because I had to decide to go one way or the other, I chose to present the longer short stories as fiction and to take the authentically memoir pieces out for another collection.

I have several other projects I need to complete before I can return to the memoir pieces to decide exactly what to do with them, but in the meantime, I thought it would be fun to share them. So I’m putting them in here, one at a time.

4. The Question

I was standing outside in the front yard eating a hardboiled egg when the question occurred to me. Or at least I was eating the white off the egg. I didn’t like the yolk, but Will would eat that for me. I don’t think, though, that the egg I was eating had anything to do with the question’s arriving, sudden and unbidden, in my brain. It just came, as questions often did, and I carried it inside to the kitchen where my mother was busy doing mother things.

“Mommy,” I asked, “how does the baby get inside the mommy’s tummy?”

My mother was standing over a pot on the stove. She stirred the pot in front of her, not turning to look at me. She didn’t answer.