Mrs. Fairfax gave birth to a toaster by Michelle Morouse
Associate fiction editor Jane Wagar on today’s bonus flash: “Mrs. Fairfax gave birth to a toaster” is a whimsical story, but also a story that speaks big truths about marriage and consumer culture while still feeling like a fairy tale. We think it’s weird, which is high praise at Passages North.
Mrs. Fairfax gave birth to a toaster
They didn’t need one, having received three for their wedding, keeping two because they couldn’t agree, and now it was too late to return them. The gift toasters went to Goodwill, and they ensconced the newborn toaster in the nursery, never admitting that they missed the shiny stainless of the old toasters, or the four slots of the larger one. It was tedious to walk upstairs to make toast, too, but such is parenthood: your lives will never be the same. After thirteen years, the toaster grew a third slot, then a fourth, before it started burning the toast.
Michelle Morouse's work has appeared, or is forthcoming in, Third Wednesday, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Pembroke Magazine, The MacGuffin, Oxford Magazine, and Peninsula Poets, among others. She is a pediatrician in Pontiac, Michigan, and is a member of Detroit Working Writers, Detroit Writers Guild, Springfed Arts, and Poetry Society of Michigan. "Mrs. Fairfax..." was inspired by a prompt given by David James at the 2018 Detroit Working Writers Conference.
