Keep Stirring

Fiction by ​​​Bethany Bruno

The day after Mary Ellen was arrested, Mama made biscuits and gravy.

I woke to the smell of bacon grease popping in the skillet, thick and salty, mixed with something heavier—flour catching on cast iron. The air already felt thick, even with the windows cracked. I slipped on my Sunday dress, the pale blue one with the peter-pan collar and padded barefoot through the hallway. 

The fan in the living room pushed warm air around like it was doing something. The linoleum in the kitchen was cool, cracked at the corners. My bare heels stuck to it when I walked.

The Philco radio sat on the windowsill next to the little clay statue of Dr. King Mama got from the church bazaar. It hummed with static as the preacher from WJLD crooned through the morning gospel hour. “This world is not my home,” he sang, and the choir behind him carried the rest. Mama had it turned low. Not out of reverence, but because her head was somewhere else.

She stood at the stove in her house dress with the tiny pink daisies. The belt was pulled tight around her waist, and she still had her pink sponge rollers in. Lipstick too--Cherries in the Snow, always. No matter what else was going on, Mama wore lipstick. It was the one thing she could control.

“Stir,” she said, without turning.

I picked up the wooden spoon, warm from sitting next to the burner. The flour had already browned in the bacon grease. It hissed and spat like it didn’t want to be touched. I stirred slowly, scraping the bottom so nothing stuck. The spoon dragged like it didn’t trust my hand.

“Don’t stop,” Mama said. “Gravy turns if you stop.”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“Gone to get the Buick looked at again.”

“And Mary Ellen?”

Mama didn’t answer. Her jaw moved like she was chewing her words before spitting them out.

Mary Ellen had left for St. Augustine the day before. She said she had a ride with two girls from Bethel A.M.E. and that they were going to pray. “Just a circle,” she said, like it wasn’t nothing. But she’d ironed her best dress twice, and I saw her slip a rolled-up sign into her purse when she thought nobody was looking. 

She kissed Mama on the cheek and told her not to worry. But Mama had already started worrying. You could see it in the way her eyes went sharp. Quiet.

The phone rang twice that evening. First to say Mary Ellen was there, then again to say she wasn’t coming back. Not yet. Not until the police let her go.

“They were trying to swim,” the voice said. “At a motel.”

The line crackled and dropped. That was all we got.

Mama stood at the sink with her back to me. Her fingers gripped the edge so tight the skin around her knuckles turned pale. I didn’t know you could cry without noise, but she did it then. Her shoulders moved just once. That’s how I knew.

Then she washed her hands, dried them on her apron, and started making cornbread.

Now I stirred the gravy while she watched. She handed me a jelly glass of milk—Pet Dairy, half gone—and nodded.

“Slowly,” she said.

I poured it in. The skillet hissed and steamed. I stirred hard to keep the lumps from forming, folding the milk into the roux until it turned smooth and the color of wet clay. The smell shifted into something rich and earthy. My arms ached, but that didn’t matter.

“They tried to swim,” I said.

Mama didn’t say a word.

“It was the Monson Motor Lodge. The white manager dumped bleach into the pool. I saw it in Jet. There was a picture of a white man pouring it in while those kids held onto each other.”

“I saw it too,” she said.

“She wasn’t doing anything wrong.”

“She was trespassing.”

Mama turned her head toward the window. I kept stirring.

Everybody knew what St. Augustine was. Oldest city in the country, they said, but old didn’t mean wise. In Birmingham, we knew better than to believe things changed just because someone passed a law. Mary Ellen had been cutting out pictures from Ebony since the church bombing in ’63. She taped those four little girls to our bedroom wall and stared at them like she knew them. She said their names out loud, like they were family.

She stopped calling herself colored. She started reading Baldwin. She made us write letters to the mayor and sign our real names. She was seventeen but walked like she was older. Like she’d seen something.

“I could do something,” she told me once, late at night when the room was hot and quiet.

“You could get hurt,” I whispered back.

“I know,” she said. “But I’d still go.”

The gravy bubbled at the edges. I scraped the bottom of the skillet and folded the heat through the paste. It was starting to smell like it should.

“You’ll stir your own one day,” Mama said. “Your own kitchen. Your own family.”

“I don’t want one.”

“You will.”

“I want to be like Mary Ellen.”

Mama turned to face me. Her eyeliner was perfect, her mouth firm. “Mary Ellen might not come back.”

I stopped. The spoon sagged in my hand. Mama looked at the pot, then back at me.

“Keep stirring,” she said.

Outside, the cicadas screamed like they always did in July. A train horn sounded in the distance, and the old dog next door barked once and gave up. From the backyard, I heard Daddy’s hammer tapping the Buick engine. Nothing ever ran right in the heat.

I switched hands and kept going. The gravy turned velvet-smooth, peppered and thick. It smelled like breakfast and funerals.

Mama sat down at the table and lit a Kool. She didn’t care if Daddy didn’t like smoking inside. Her lipstick ring clung to the filter. She blew the smoke out slowly and looked through the screen door like something might show up out there.

“She don’t write. She don’t call. Just gets herself locked up and leaves me here to worry,” she said.

“She was trying to help.”

“She’s a girl.”

“She’s a person.”

The words fell out before I could catch them. They landed in the room like a dropped dish.

Mama didn’t flinch. She took another drag and exhaled through her nose.

“You want to be helpful?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t get arrested. Raise good children. Make good food. Keep your mouth shut unless it counts.”

“Does this count?”

She looked at me. For real. Like I wasn’t a child anymore.

And for a second, I saw it. The girl she used to be. Long legs. A fast mouth. A mind like flint. Before the apron. Before the house. Before she learned how to push it all down.

Then it was gone.

She stubbed out her cigarette. “Get the biscuits.”

The oven door creaked when I opened it. The biscuits were wrapped in a dish towel stitched with red roosters. Mama’s china had little blue flowers along the rim. The plates she got when she married Daddy back in ’47. The ones she only stopped saving for company after her third child was born.

I spooned gravy over both plates. The smell hit me deep in the chest. Mama sipped her coffee, black and bitter. Her mug said World’s Best Cook, but I never heard her say she believed it.

“Will you tell Daddy?”

“I’ll say she’s with friends. That she’s safe.”

“She’s not safe.”

“She’s safer if nobody knows.”

I broke my biscuit open. The inside was hot and soft, steam curling up. I wanted to ask how justice could be justice if it had to hide. If it made you lie. If it made your Mama scared of her own daughter.

Instead, I reached for the salt. The gravy needed more.

That night, I lay in bed sweating. The fan clattered like it was losing its will. Mary Ellen’s bed was still made. Her pillow smelled like Luster’s Pink Oil. Her church shoes lined up beneath her quilt like she might come back and need them.

“I want to go too,” I whispered.

I said it again. Not to Mama. Not to God.

Just to the room. To the heat. To the blood in my chest that felt too loud to ignore.

In the morning, Sam Cooke’s voice drifted through the window from someone’s porch.
​
Mama stood at the stove. The skillet hissed. The flour smoked.

“Stir,” she said.

I picked up the spoon.

The pot waited.

The gravy had already started to burn.​

Bethany Bruno

Bethany Bruno is a Floridian author and amateur historian. Born in Hollywood and raised in Port St. Lucie, she holds a BA in English from Flagler College and an MA from the University of North Florida. Her work has appeared in more than eighty literary journals and magazines, including The Sun, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, and The Huffington Post. A Best of the Net nominee, she has won Inscape Journal’s 2025 Flash Contest and Blue Earth Review’s 2025 Dog Daze Contest for Flash Fiction. Learn more at www.bethanybrunowriter.com.