Jill & Lily

J.R. Dawson breaks and unbreaks hearts with relativity in this week’s gorgeous new story.

June’s adventures on the Sunday Morning Transport include stories by Alex London, J.R. Dawson, Andrea Philips, and Karen Joy Fowler.

We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page. Enormous congratulations go to Thomas Ha for the inclusion of his Sunday Morning Transport story “The Patron,” in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2026.

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~ Julian and Fran, June 14, 2026

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Jill & Lily

by J. R. Dawson

2078: The Beginning

Lily died in August of 2077. Jill went back for her in January of 2078.

It took her that long to convince their son to help her. George was stubborn and said it was a bad idea. Jill wouldn’t listen. George said Lily was sick and it was her time to leave. Jill said time was relative and George should know that.

“You’ve never read any Wells, have you?” George said, and Jill did not appreciate her son’s pretentious lip.

“We’ve only been able to send artifacts and mice back,” George said, standing at the lone window in the sanitized room. “You can only exist when your matter existed. And you have to understand, it takes a long time. Also, you’re not a mouse.”

“But I’ll get there eventually,” Jill said.

“Mom,” George pleaded. “Imagine your life is a long road trip. You start off in Cincinnati, and you have to get to Seattle. Once you get to Seattle, you’re in Seattle. If you want to go back to Cincinnati, you can’t just close your eyes and wake up in Cincinnati. You have to drive all the way back—”

“I’m not going to Cincinnati,” Jill said. “Now hush up and tell me what we need to do.”

“You’re not supposed to go back, Mom,” George said.

All Jill had was back. There was nothing in front of her. And she said that out loud.

“Awesome. How do you think that makes me feel?” George said. “I’m still here.”

But Jill wouldn’t be here, as in alive, for much longer. It would be ten years at the most, with George ducking in and out of this nursing home that smelled like dead tuna fish. Eventually George would get busy with his own life, his own family, and everyone always moves on when old people start being useless. She saw it in the way George treated Lily’s memory. Her wife, his mother, was useless, now that she was dead.

“Whatever you do, you’re going to lose her again,” George said. “Death is something that inevitably happens, even if you try to change course. Mom, you’re just going to end up hurting even more. You’ll rewind the funeral, you’ll see her open her eyes, get stronger, younger . . . but there’s always a last day, Mom. There will be the day you meet her, and then you’ll still have to say goodbye.”

“We met when I was twenty,” Jill said. “That’s seventy more years with her.”

“And twenty years without,” George said.

George had lost a mother. The world had lost an old woman. None of them had lost a wife. So Jill was the only one who could understand how only just a day would carry enough weight for a lifetime.

When George left that night, his answer was no.

But on Thursday he brought the vial to the nursing home. He stood at the edge of Jill’s bed, looking from the vial to his mother and back to the vial like he didn’t quite know how to plug a US phone charger into a European wall.

“What made you change your mind?” Jill said, trying not to sound ecstatic.

“I love you,” he said.

“Hurry up then!” Jill said. “Before they come get me for dinner. Let’s go. Hup hup.”

“Mom,” George said. “We’ve only done this with simpler matter. I don’t even know—”

“How do you give it to the mice?”

“We injected it into one mouse, and he showed up three days earlier with his guts on his outside.”

“Did you tweak the serum afterward?”

“Yes, but—”

“Put it in!” Jill said. “Or I’ll drink it!”

“Don’t you even want to know what it does?” George said weakly. “Mom, it has to do with your gravitational—”

Jill snatched it. She drank it down. Nothing happened. And once again, she was disappointed in George.