The imagery in Beyond the Threshold by Emory MD/PhD candidate Aubrey Reed, reminds me of my mother when she had Alzheimer’s, of which my story “Mirella”(Fall 2025 Intima) is a fictional portrayal. My mother, displaced in a memory facility, talked often of the homes where she had lived. She got them all confused, but one thing was clear: She wanted to go home.

My mother had lived mainly in three houses in her life. The stone farmhouse in Italy where she was born and stayed until she was 21, a California tract house in the Central Valley, and a hillside home in Marin County. She worked hard to make her California homes appealing, suited to her family’s routines, and clean. She was always washing dishes, chopping onions, doing laundry, sweeping and vacuuming. Like the female figure in Threshold, she was identified with her home. Her home was her. As she lost her memory, she clung to details of her homes, asking me if I remembered the rattan couch with flamingo slipcovers, the blue and red Persian carpets, the yellow kitchen. I felt like if she lost the memories of the homes she had worked so hard to create, she would not be herself anymore.

My mother had another side, however. She was an artist. Not one who ever had a gallery or sold her work, but a person who took many art classes and went to museums all over the world and who drew and painted between household chores. The memory facility offered art classes, and my mother took them. One time I went to art class with her and met her teacher, who showed me an object my mother had made. It was a paper hat. The band of the hat was made of sharply folded newspaper, and the crown was an abstract flower cut from red construction paper, again with sharp folds. It was an expertly executed object, light years beyond the hats her classmates had made. She put it on her head and smiled at me, showing the flaming red spirit inside her that I will always remember.

Annette Leddy is a fiction writer and author of the novel Earth Still. Leddy, who is also an oral historian for artist foundations, held the position of New York Collector for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. She has published essays and reviews on artists connected to Surrealism, Futurism, or Conceptual Art, and co-authored Farewell to Surrealism: the Dyn Circle in Mexico. Her short story “Mirella” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2025.