Mighty Mom
by KJ Hannah Greenberg

 

 

Mighty Mom folded her apron. It was a weird habit given that she anyway laundered her smock at the end of each day. It was equally peculiar that she had redecorated her fish tavern with cacti, not aquariums.

 

Mom didn’t care; birthing the twins had permanently ripped her external genitalia, causing her to reassess her life. Mainly, she stopped allowing business pressures to propel her to fantasize about appearing on Only Fans. Instead, when frustrated, Mom began testing her superpowers’ range (she, likewise, reminded herself that everyone has sci-fi abilities albeit most folks stay unaware of them.)

 

Around the same time as she began concentrating on her dynamic aptitudes, Mom swapped agaves and aloes for her dining hall’s bettas and minnows and positioned a tall blue torch cactus in her place’s entryway. Mixing desert plants with plates of seafaring critters was her means of loudly communicating her resistance to the world’s objectification of women—participating in or helping to legalize sex trades was only one among many available routes to that sort of protest. Choosing to run a business without relying on the strictures of logical positivism, too, affirmed an estrogen-fueled Weltanschauung.

 

What’s more, Mom began engaging in murky dealings at odd hours. During most crepuscular spans, she left the cooking to her commis and took flight into the twilight.  After all, someone had to rescue the downtrodden from corporate scions’ manipulation.

 

Mom battled organizational flimflam with focused rhetoric, with the rays of a gem, which she had received from a Jupiter lobster, and with the ammonia-like smell oozing from a large, spoiled cod that she had weaponized. Often, Mom’s efforts restored justice, or, in the least, exposed the cowardice of persons who bullied others. Few rogues, e.g., hedge fund managers, proved immune to her fish’s hazardous breakdown of trimethylamine or to being vaporized by her stone’s high energy light. As per her purple prose, those melodramatic words caused even former marines, repurposed as cybercriminals, to cry.

 

Mighty Mom would have preferred that villains make restitution, not collapse and blubber,  but she believed that liquescing their resolve sufficed. Besides, she couldn’t trust her line cooks to work too long without her supervision.

 

In consequence, years of stewing shellfish-free bouillabaisse and of marinating Peruvian ceviche passed without excitement. True, there was the time when one of her sous chefs forgot to dredge a portion of sole, as well as the time when her saucier left out the tomato paste in the coulis for a portion of Thieboudienne. Nonetheless, overall, Mom’s days and nights remained routine.

 

Around the time that Mom was contemplating selling her oceanic bistro and retiring, The Event occurred. In a nearby quadrant of her city, heavy-handed corruption was proceeding. More specifically, financial thugs were swathing the mayor in paper currency.

 

The council chambers’ cleaning lady, a gal who enjoyed Mighty Mom’s preparation of pan-seared salmon on a weekly basis, and who sometimes enhanced her earnings by serving as Mom’s sidekick, Thunderous Mumsy, had alerted Mom to the goings-on.

 

Mumsy, who possessed no Jupiter-sourced laser ring and was ordinarily too shy to sprout turgid exclamations, conversely, was expert at pitching opened cans of surströmming. Hers was a .3 batting average. In fact, half of the county jail’s white collar crooks had been collected, judged, and punished after being felled by Mumsy.

 

Thus, it was that the Uber, which had deposited Mighty Mom, had delivered her to a building keeper fortified with newly opened canisters of lightly salted, fermented Baltic Sea herring. Together, the duo stormed the municipal hall’s boardroom.

 

For the first time during the course of their shared adventures, the matrons were met with resistance. The fiduciary boogeymen had brought not only cash, but also caged, sterile mosquitos. The bugs’ lineage was halted, but not their interest in human blood. Upon being released by a hoodlum, those parasites swarmed the supermoms. Meanwhile, the lawbreakers strolled out of the conference space and then made their getaway on public buses. It was the first and only time that Mighty Mom was confounded.

 

The burgomaster, whose pockets were stuffed with dosh, too, left the space. On his way out, he instructed security guards to escort the ladies off the premises.

 

Fortunately, the bad guys’ pests were attracted to the surströmming. Using a combination of the wet hand technique and perpendicular catching, the heroes seized most of those annoying flies. Subsequently, they transported those winged provocations to Mom’s costal brasserie. There, her live carp and minnows feasted. Mom never told a single guest why her gefilte fish and her fish head soup were especially tasty that season.

 

In the years that followed, Thunderous Mumsy relocated to Ontario and Mighty Mom downgraded to a food truck. Her new business’s specialty was fish tacos. Even so, her sidewalk tables bore mammillarias.

 

Although Mom no longer sought to correct weighty, illicit gains, she retained her Jupiter treasure and always concealed, on her person, a rotten mullet or two. Additionally, Mom refused to surrender her bombastic words. If a customer tried to shortchange her or to skip past others in the order line, she’d let fly such precise magniloquence that offenders would offer retribution to anyone within eyesight.

 

It came to be that many unhomed persons took to hanging out around the periphery of Mom’s van to enjoy the meals purchased by unprincipled customers, and that a smock doubled over, gathered chairs and tables, and the wafting odor from a garbage can filled with marine scraps came to characterize her mobile kitchen’s closing time. Furthermore, few patrons knew that after locking up, Mom trained, at a special gym, to run the gauntlet at American Nija Warrior.

 

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