Mama Wanted
- Sep 26, 2025
- 3 min read
by Julia Strayer
Mama wanted a house, so she stole one she found abandoned on the corner of Sycamore and Grant that she said would be happier with a family to love it. It was just the two of us and that didn’t feel like a complete family to me, but we’d been moving a few times a year and I liked the idea of a home. She knew some people who knew some people who owed someone a favor and had the right equipment and a big truck, so they boarded the windows, loaded it up — spider webs and mice included, and drove west toward the setting sun.
Mama wanted to plant it on a beach to watch incoming and outgoing tides, but the moving people said the favor they owed wasn’t big enough to go all the way to the ocean, so they dropped the house in eastern Nebraska in a prairie of big bluestem, Indian grass, and switch grass taller than I stood. The wind would sweep through, tickling the grass into fits of soft whispers, and the field would undulate in waves.
We set up house, and Mama got a job at Homer’s Five and Dime. She stole swirl-striped tights and scraps of material and crafted a long shirt and pointy hat, and I trick-or-treated as a birthday candle. Mama was pleased with her handiwork but not with my picture in the local paper for most creative costume.
Mama found a better paying job at the mannequin factory painting faces on the heads. She stole the mannequins she liked best, introduced them to me by name, and set them on the couch to watch TV with us. After a while, she painted one to look like me and dressed it in my clothes and kept it at the piano, even though the piano didn’t have strings and I couldn’t play even if it had.
Sometimes I’d come home to find her dressed in layers and layers of clothes and the mannequins would be naked, other times, they were all dressed, and she was naked, except for her shoes. Sometimes they’d all be headless, and I’d find the heads in the refrigerator cooling off.
No one ever came for the stolen house or tights and material or mannequins, but someone did eventually come for me, saying I’d been stolen from a nice family who’d been searching for me. I only agreed to go once they agreed not to arrest Mama, and they only agreed to that if I had no contact with her until I was twenty-one.
I ended up with a normal family of two parents and four siblings, but they never felt like my family. They were already set in their ways, and I felt like a mannequin with nothing to say when they circled their memories and funny moments of Great Aunt Gertie while passing the gravy boat at holiday dinners.
I imagined Mama with her plastic people in the house. Uncle Danny with red hair keeping watch from an upper window, cousin Mable and her husband Marv sitting at the kitchen table with her for morning coffee, Grandma in a chair near the bed, a girl wearing my clothes at the piano — a complete family. I never asked her why she painted one like me. Maybe she knew I’d leave, and she’d be left in the big house adrift on the sea of grasses.
Julia Strayer has stories in Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review Online, Jellyfish Review, The Cincinnati Review, Fractured Lit, Atticus Review, Flash Frog, HAD, and others, including the Wigleaf Top 50 and the Best Small Fictions. She’s a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and teaches creative writing at New York University. https://juliastrayer.com
