The day has come to celebrate mothers around the world once more. We thought it was also a great excuse to showcase some of our authors who have submitted stories featuring mothers and motherhood. Please enjoy our selection of ten stories below and remember we open submissions for original fiction every March and October, but you can submit your reprints any time of the year.
Happy reading!
1. Perfect Mother by A. V. Greene
Tread carefully with this one as it contains content that might be disturbing to some readers, including pregnancy loss and graphic violence.
After suffering a miscarriage at a professional conference, a young mortician becomes a surrogate mother to a deathless and extremely hungry entity.
Read full story here. (Reading time: 14 minutes.)
2. Twinkle Twinkle by Matthew Keely
A mother, son, and grandmother evacuate a dark, frozen planet earth but dread something even worse.
Read full story here. (Reading time: 5 minutes.)
3. Imaginary Children by Janet Stilson
A lonely, powerful woman takes part in a risky experiment that allows her to see visions of the children she could conceive with certain men—strangers whom she would find deeply attractive. She becomes obsessed with finding a man who is triggering visions of one child in particular.
Read full story here. (Reading time: 24 minutes.)
4. I Will Wait for You by Caleb Stephens
One of our first original short stories we published.
A grieving mother on Halloween and all she’s lost.
Read full story here. (Reading time: 4 minutes)
5. Through a Glass Darkly by Robin Kers
In the quiet depths of an Ottawa laboratory, Malcolm Reiner dared to rewrite the very fabric of biology, pursuing the dream of mirror-image life forms—an uncharted path on the edge of human understanding.
Read full story here. (Reading time: 5 minutes.)
6. Tuning by Zary Fekete
A mother who is frustrated with her teenage daughter comes across a magical object that can repair items. She wonders what effect the object might have if she used it on her daughter.
Read full story here. (Reading time: 11 minutes.)
7. Fractures Like Windows and Time by Emma Burnett
This story was featured in The Best of MetaStellar Year Three and we cannot get enough of it!
Parenting is hard enough without help from the multiverse.
Read full story here. (Reading time: 8 minutes.)
8. A Song for the Leadwood Tree by Aimee Ogden
Nehan is her people’s wartime queen, and must surrender her crown if she can repel her country’s invaders. With her biological daughters dead, she must hope she has done enough to smooth the way for her adopted son, the orphan of poor nomad folk, to rule after her.
Read full story here. (Reading time: 17 minutes.)
9. A Mother Knows by Andrea Goyan
After fertility reached an all time low, fertile women are inseminated in an effort to save humanity. While caring for her dying child, one mother takes measure to ensure she won’t have another baby.
Read full story here. (Reading time: 2 minutes.)
10. The Magic Knapsack by Henry Herz
A boy’s love for his mother helps him avoid a snare set by the Devil.
Read full story here. (Reading time: 4 minutes.)
Adriana Acevedo is an editor, writer, and sleep paralysis demon. She's been published in magazines like samfiftyfour and Impostor. She's bilingual and living in the monstrous Mexico City. Whenever she's not reading horror stories or watching horror movies, she's baking sourdough bread. Read more of her writing here.