In Short – Issue 4 (Winter 2026)

January 31, 2026

Image credit: Jaina Cipriano

Does Your Mother Know?

By Kit Carlson

Does your mother know you’re out here in those shoes? I wonder. The students go by in twenty-two February degrees, two-inches-and-still-accumulating snow, slogging their way to class. Warm in my car, feet snug in insulated black ankle boots, stopped at the crosswalk between Brody dorm and the Michigan State campus, I marvel at them, navigating this bleak morning in high-top Chucks (white canvas stained with wet snow spray), or tiny Ugg clogs (pink sock heels already soaked through), alongside an army of inappropriate athletic shoes, water and wind seeping into the ventilation holes of Reeboks and Pumas and FootJoys, and then—the impossible hope of Nike flipflops worn over athletic socks, one flop flipping free when its owner stumbles on a snow berm.

You could catch your death, I think.

Their mothers undoubtedly do not know about these shoes. Even though so many track their children by cell phone location—no matter if the student is seventeen or even twenty-one—there is only so much a parent can know, when all they see is a blue dot on a map, moving incrementally past the softball field and football stadium, over the bridge at the library, along the half-frozen Red Cedar River on the way to Nat Sci or Psych. All they can do is text later: How was class today? How was the test? They can’t know what it’s like to be one anonymous blue dot in a crowd of thousands slip-sliding through a dark February morning.

Decades ago, I walked these same winter sidewalks, slopped through the same icy crosswalks, and climbed the same snowplow snow piles, hunched against the flurries’ invasive sting. As I watch the students disappear into campus, I wonder if any of them feel untraceable, the way I did then. My mother couldn’t track me, couldn’t know anything about me really, beyond what I shared on the weekly Sunday phone call—kept short, because long distance was expensive—kept short, because too much was just too hard to share.

I wasn’t even a blue dot on someone’s iPhone then, only a girl dutifully shod in sturdy, knee-high snow boots, whose mother never thought I might just stop on the library bridge—not going forward, not going back, leaning against the railing, watching white floes bump down the black current of the Red Cedar, listening to falling snow hiss against the rippling surface, lingering long after class had begun and the sidewalks had emptied. Alone and wondering: how cold the water really was, how it might feel to fall, how the river would soak my socks and fill my boots, how I could catch my death.

Kit Carlson is an Episcopal priest and a life-long writer with work recently published in River Teeth, EcoTheo Review, Beautiful Things, Bending Genres, and Burningword Literary Journal, among others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of Short Fictions and was recently named a finalist in Orison Books' Best Spiritual Writing contest for 2025. Kit lives in East Lansing, Michigan, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog. Find her at kitcarlson.org.