The New Terms by Timothy Boudreau & Patricia Quintana Bidar

     Taber Andrew Bain CC



The New Terms


    Lily pauses just inside her mother’s door, closes it softly. Her mom’s sitting in her green recliner, wearing a white tunic. No pants. A pink headband like the one Lily lost in third grade. The screams of the TV’s “live studio audience” fill the space, an overbearing presence. Lily grimaces. She touches her throbbing tooth with her tongue. 
    “Look what the cat dragged in.” When Lily enters, her mother shuts off the TV, angles her head but doesn’t rise. “I hope you’re ready to win.” The day’s excursion is to the nearest Indian gaming casino, the Four Feathers.
    “Hey, cute stuff.” On a paper plate on the coffee table are her mother’s pills, green triangles, white hexagons and more. She takes two with a sip from a tumbler of white wine. Someday Lily will be required to remember their uses and frequencies. Her mother, she sees, is wearing a diaper. 
    “Where’s Reilly?” Her mom barely looks up.
    Where are your pants? “Working.”
    “Everything copacetic?” 
    Copacetic like when you left me at the laundromat so you could go fuck that motorcycle mechanic? Lily bites her tongue. “My therapist says I’m trying to give Reilly what I need, and he’s trying to give me what he needs.” The words sound ridiculous in her mother’s presence. “My thing is being neglected; his is trauma. He can’t ask for help. He’s armored.” 
    Her mother doesn’t take the neglected bait. “He’s a good earner.” Her gaze flicks to Lily’s thighs. “Plus, he stays in shape.” 
    The talking’s conveying air to Lily’s hot tooth. Maybe there’s still valium in the bathroom cabinet? “The gym is his coping mechanism. Like yours is wine and gambling.”
    “Honey, everything we do is a coping mechanism.” 
    “Everything?”
    “When you were a fat teenager scarfing mixing bowls of Apple Jacks, that was a coping mechanism. Nothing’s new.”
    “But definitions are useful,” Lily sniffs. “The new terms—”
    “These quacks pretend they discovered something that isn’t already common knowledge. They want you to subscribe to their YouTube channel.”
    Lily stalks to the desk, fires up her mother’s desktop. Muttering, “That channel has some excellent resources.” 
    “Talking doesn’t change a thing. Life is still everyone getting whirred up in a goddamn blender.”

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    Lily sees her reflection in the desktop monitor, rubs her jaw. If she and Reilly can just last until her mother passes. “Just take care of yourself for once before all hell breaks loose!” she can hear her mother saying. Echoing her advice for Lily’s past boyfriend crises and health scares, which Lily always let devolve into temporary restraining orders and emergency procedures. 
    Muscle men mutual hand jobs. Best bodybuilders, explosive orgasm. “Jesus Christ, Ma!” The browser history makes Lily want to wash her hands. “What, you don’t want to see men with women?”
    “Not interested. Those fake boobies,” her mom goes on. “They even have fake butts now. It's … unfair!” She wiggles in her chair in a way Lily finds horrifying. At least she’s put on pants.


    In her mother’s bathroom, Lily scores, sort of. No valium, but in the older woman’s purse she finds a sandwich baggie of cashews. A packed snack for the casino. She pockets it.


    They’re no more than a mile out of town when her mother says in a small voice, “I need to go.”
    “So go.”
    “It’s an emergency.” 
    “Aren’t you—I mean, aren’t we prepared for that?”
    “It’s gonna be a lot.”
    So Lily pulls into a QuikStop, runs to help her mom out of the car. “Don’t worry about your cane, let’s get you in,” she tells her, an arm around her mother’s shoulders. She hustles her past the pumps into the store, to the restroom in back. 
    While she waits, Lily wants. A Slushy, Slim Jims, Twix. When her mom was in the tavern, she’d leave twelve-year-old Lily in the car with a junk food bonanza.
    “I need your help,” her mother’s voice comes after a minute. “Did you bring the extra one?”
“Fuck.” Lily takes a step toward the restroom door. “I’ll get it.”


    After she cleans and packages her mother, Lily settles her into the passenger seat. She’s still holding the used diaper in a plastic grocery bag.
    “I’m a dog now? You bring the crap home?”
    Lily throws the bag into her trunk, then gets behind the wheel. “I didn’t want to just leave it.” She turns the car toward her mother’s condo community. 
    “Wait; we’re still going, right? A couple shots at the slots? Graze the buffet?”
    “It’s too late.” Lily clears her throat. “Ma, we need to take a break. From each other. We need space.”
    “Are you quoting from something again?”
    “It’s what it is, Mama.”
    “Just grow up, won’t you? Find your own words, Lily. Not these…terms.” When Lily doesn’t answer, she says it again, and again when they arrive at the condo complex and Lily helps her mother out and up the walk to her door, and through the portal, where Lily remains and does not enter.
    “Find your words!” Her mother cries again. She turns to the keyboard on the desk, smacks it with her cane, hits until plastic cracks and the letters shatter off and skitter across the floor.


    In her car, back on the highway, Lily crams her mouth with the cashews. Once the filling breaks free, the rest of the tooth crumbles surprisingly easily. The shards mingle with the chewed nuts. She spits them onto the passenger side floor. She reminds herself to call, admit she accidentally left the bagged diaper in the hallway, confirm her mother has food and wine stocked. Lily smiles, thinking about the boobies and butts. The hopefulness of the pink headband. Her jaw throbs. Before she reaches her block, she reaches for more cashews. Stuffs them in. 

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​Timothy Boudreau lives in northern New Hampshire with his wife, Judy. His collection Saturday Night and other Short Stories is available through Hobblebush Books. His novel All We Knew Were Our Hearts is due out from ELJ Editions in 2026. He is an editor at The Loveliest Review. Find him on Twitter at @tcboudreau or at http://timothyboudreau.com.

Patricia Quintana Bidar is a western writer from the Port of Los Angeles area. Her work appears in Wigleaf, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Pinch, Little Patuxent Review, and in the anthologies Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Small Fictions 2023 and 2024 (Alternating Current), and Best Microfiction 2023 (Pelekinesis Press). Her book of short works, Pardon Me For Moonwalking, is coming from Unsolicited Press in 2025. See more at https://patriciaqbidar.com
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