Jamy Bond

Jamy Bond’s work has appeared in Wigleaf, The Rumpus, The Sun Magazine, Peace Corps Writers, and on National Public Radio’s The Sound of Writing.  Her essay, What Feels Like Destiny, published in The Sun, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  She has an MFA from George Mason University where she co-founded So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.  She lives in Washington, DC.

WE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW by Jamy Bond

That your mother is dying alone in a room at St. Francis. The stale sighs of a ventilator echo through the hallways, pumping one last moment of life into her over and over and over. There’s a sad sliver of hope in the sound of it, and in the silence that follows.   She forgives the insolence, the years you spent overseas and never called, the sporadic letters full of vacancy, even your cold indifference to her cancer diagnosis. She has mostly forgotten your teenage shenanigans: the time you snuck bourbon into your lunch box and drank it at school, nights…

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COME HERE, I WANT TO TELL YOU SOMETHING by Jamy Bond

Sometimes, I would catch her peering through a crack in my bedroom door as I changed, watching me with those blue dagger eyes. “Do you think you need some new bras?” she might say later, “those no longer seem to fit.” A way of letting me know what she’d seen.  Locks were not allowed in our house, not even in the bathroom, and sometimes she would stand outside of the door while I bathed, chatting away like we were friends.  She’d rattle the doorknob, just to let me know she could come in if she wanted to.   Come here, I…

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THE BABY by Jamy Bond

One morning, she told me the story of how her friend’s baby died in a car accident.  “They were stopped at a red light. Someone came up from behind and slammed into them. My friend thought immediately of her baby in the back seat, but when she turned around to reach for it, she saw the baby’s head pop off, its arms and legs break, its chest cave in.” All I could think about at school that day was the baby. Its head popping off. We were supposed to practice writing our letters, but every time I came to the…

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