As the day bends toward night, we fill the kitchen with simmering smells–bits of onion sizzling with chicken and pungent Indian spices, the roasted sweetness of Winter squash. The sky matures to a dusky persimmon, and I wipe butternut gold from the blade of the knife. “Mom Jones, when’s Dad Jones coming home?” Riley asks, […]

It makes me want to hide. I type the words–vulnerable, the most honest ones I can offer, into my text to Kevin, curling my phone in exactly the way I want to curl myself, further and further away, until I’ve hidden all the tender parts of me. This day, so heavy with life, feels so […]

Walking down the Winter road, everything the color of bone, you could miss all your new beginnings. Faster, faster. Even the street seems like a challenge to hurry, the landscape like a warning. Time is running out. The bare trees reach, branches like skeletal fingers, like venous tributaries invisibly leaking life into thin air, like […]

In the garage, on the way in at the end of a bruised up day, Riley has another seizure.  Kevin, coming around the other side of the car, sees her stop, notices her sudden silence.  He calls her name, and she turns her head but can’t answer. Stuck, her head bobs, like something sinister has […]

In the window, the orchid’s petals drop, crisp and thin, like elegant parchment cut-outs piling in drifts on the sill. Their rose hue has faded to ivory; they age like paper, but far more quickly. I cup my hand, sweeping in the soft, dead things, murmuring about the loss of another fragile life. “I wonder […]

The pavement stretches, dappled in shadow. I walk, looking down, weighted by a thousand things, watching my feet. Those feet, they pound tired, thunking against the road. I move past a puddle, a murky earth-carved divot full of leftovers from yesterday’s rain. In my heart, I replay hurtful conversations; I am cistern, collecting disappointment. On […]

Dumbbells gripped in hand, lifted over me like the weight that knots my neck, I remember thinking only of what will be next, after this. I used to plot it out by the hour, how I’d manage to do my way through the morning and into the afternoon. And then, and then, and then. How […]

I remember sitting at a too short Formica table, overflowing a child-sized chair, in the play area where a couple of bright, shiny women evaluated my then two-year-old Riley. Riley, distractedly pushing platinum corkscrew curls away from her eyes, lined chunky animals along a busy, primary carpet in a long, snaking line. It looked like […]

My friend and I, we walk, and I tell her about Riley’s last seizure, the words tumbling from my mouth in a rush. The story’s only hours old; it happened the night before, so this is how I’m doing. My friend listens intently, nodding a little in encouragement when I look at her, gasping in […]

“I don’t know what to say,” Riley says, something very likely often true, only now, while my knees carve moons in the carpet beside her bed, she feels vulnerable enough to admit it. I smooth Riley’s hair with my hand, playing with the tiny, curling strands about her ears, thinking that the only thing she […]