M.C. Chambers

M.C. (Mary) Chambers holds degrees in Music and in Computer Science. She is now retired from both fields. Her fiction has won a National Space Society award, a Heartland Writers’ Guild contest, and an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest. Her short stories appear in various anthologies internationally.

Her works include examples of science fiction, fantasy, and magic realism; stories in which things are rarely what they seem, but courage and loyalty are constants. She is now working on a second novel and several shorter works. She is a retired flutist, a mother of five grown sons, and a retired variable print programmer. She lives in Independence, Missouri with her spouse, two cats, a dog, a cockatiel, and way too many snake plants. She likes rocks.

Mother of Heroes
Each morning, my feet pick their way over a floor strewn with bodies. Bodies of tiny warriors, beside tiny dismembered limbs, plastic guns, swords, knives and alien blasters. From the hallway, my feet cross shark-infested carpet, where pirate ships with tall sails loom with magnificent bravado. With a series of mighty leaps, my feet escape the tall ships only to become enmeshed in a maze of cables, at one end of which is a roaring amphibious monster shedding swarms of vile, slimy offspring. At the other end is my own offspring, one of five sons, doing electronic battle with fierce, relentless glee.

These five sons and I fuel each other’s imaginary acts of daring. They surround me with the images, props and verbiage of great deeds. With plastic weapons and a trampoline as a battleground, they enact action scenes from my stories, helping me, a sedentary data processor, to visualize and choreograph with greater credibility. When they use and expand upon that scene in their own play, I eagerly create another, inspired by having inspired.

And, they set the scene for the heroic journey I take daily. With intellectual and strategic prowess, I solve once again the maze of wires and enter at last the refuge of the kitchen. There, the final quest begins: the search for that most elusive, yet most sought-after of prizes–a cup clean enough for tea.

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