Mona’s writing appeared in:
Featured writing
Waiting For Love
I hide at the top of the stairwell, aching for my grandmother’s hug. Behind me, the red door to our private quarters. Below, our guests; in conversations over rolls with our homemade jam, using our tableware.
Windshield Wipers
This piece was shortlisted for the 2024 WestWord Flash Prize.
I'm so sorry that I left the windshield wiper halfway up. I'm sorry it stuck up like your sore thumb with no way to come down from its high, the kind of high you were on as I behaved like myself again, that way that nobody but you would put up with in all those million years I've stayed.
Hollow Pain
Wanting to take back her words, it was too late. The teacher made eye contact with me, and her face had lost much of its color. She tried to hug me as my tears came.
Belonging
"How do you heal from such things, things that are bigger than you, from history? How do you forgive yourself when there’s never in a thousand moons enough shame for one person to feel? Enough shame to make up for the cruelty of an entire atrocious era in time?"
Shameful Friendships
“‘You need to cover your arms – you're way too skinny,’ my best friend said over dinner. I shoveled more peanut sauce over my meal, just so she wouldn't think I was trying to be thin on purpose.”
Forgetting
My grandmother’s decline started long before the beginning of the end.
It started long before she began repeating the same questions over and over, in thirty-second intervals. A long time before she tried to leave the house at night to go find her long-deceased mother in town. It started long before she thought she’d make coffee for the guests of her childhood boarding house that had been torn down some 50 years earlier.
And then it ended. It ended with me seeing death for the first time.