Inheritance

by Bethany Bruno

The first thing my mother left me was a jar. Wide-mouthed, Mason glass, cloudy at the rim. She pressed it into my hands the morning she stopped speaking. Her lips moved like pale paper fluttering in the wind.

“Keep it closed,” she mouthed. 

Inside: a moth, its gray wings frantic against the glass. Dust fell in tiny storms, coating the sides in a powdery script I couldn’t read. The air inside shimmered faintly, as if it carried a pulse of its own.

I carried it home, tucked against my chest like an infant. On my nightstand it sat, patient, watchful. The wings whispered whenever I tried to sleep, brushing against glass in restless rhythms. Some nights I dreamed the sound was rain falling on tin, steady and endless. Other nights I thought it was her breath, shallow and near.

Days passed. The jar fogged. My friends noticed the bandage wrapped around my wrist. “Cat scratch?” they asked. I shook my head. I didn’t tell them how the glass seared when I tried to lift it, how its heat branded a circle into my skin.

The moth grew louder. Its body thudded against the glass, steady as a heartbeat. I pressed my ear to the lid and heard not wings but syllables, half-formed. It was not quite language, but enough to make me close my eyes and believe my mother was still speaking to me from the other side of silence.

One night the jar glowed faintly, as though filled with ash on fire. The light slid across the walls in smoke-gray waves. My room smelled of singed feathers, of old libraries. I unscrewed the lid. The moth rose in a column of dust, circled once, and vanished into the dark seam of the ceiling.

When I woke, the jar was empty but heavier than before. Heavier than grief, heavier than stone. I lifted it with both hands and nearly dropped it from the weight of everything pressing inside.

I carried it to the canal where my mother’s ashes had been scattered. The water lay still, reflecting a sky veined with clouds. Cicadas sang from the banks, their chorus like wires stretched too tight. I knelt at the edge and tipped the jar forward.

I expected bubbles, ripples, some sign of release. Instead the jar pulled against me, filling itself again. Not with water. Not with moths. But, with something I recognized instantly: the words I had never spoken to her. The apologies, the confessions, the gratitude caught in my throat for years.

The glass fogged, and for an instant I saw her face pressed against it, lips moving once more. Pale as paper. Asking nothing, offering nothing. Only returning what I could not give her in time.

The fog cleared. Inside, the moth had returned, its wings brighter, beating against the glass with furious light.

I dropped the jar into the canal and watched it sink. The glow kept burning long after the water closed over it.

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 https://www.bethanybrunowriter.com