I don’t know her name–not the sound of her voice, not even the shape of her smile. As it is these days, because of the mask she wears, her eyes—dark and determined and locked on mine–are all I know of her, those eyes and that hair, curling dark around her head in short, wild corkscrews. […]

Robert Frost would be proud: Every night Adam roams and roams for miles before he sleeps, up and down the same stretch of hall, his heavy tread pressing the carpet flat, beating out a path. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. In muffled pilgrimage, he travels overhead, across the living room ceiling and back […]

When we get home from our trip, the package awaits, a kit Adam bought for Kevin’s birthday, a light-up speaker they can build together. Riley sits the box carefully at Kevin’s place at the dinner table so he can open it later, along with the rest of the mail that came while we were away. […]

“At least I’m doing something,” Zoe says, shadow-mumbling, making reckless half-spins in my office chair, turned to face Kevin and me, coffee mug cradled in her hands. “I mean, I’m trying.” I wait for a wave of hot coffee to crest and spill over the side of her mug, wait for it to drip from […]

Sometimes all I can see is what hurts, what’s hard, what I wish could be different. Before we even leave our driveway, Riley stops, setting her water bottle down, handing me the paper, her pen. She lifts her sunglasses, peers more closely at her phone. “It says license plate, so…” She talks to herself more […]

Beside the auditorium door, Adam sways, a reed gently tossed, rooted at the feet. For Adam, this represents an attempt at stillness, this planted shifting of weight from foot to foot. I glance at him and smile, and he bends a lengthy arm, touching his name tag with the tips of his fingers, moving a […]

The young man meets us in the parking lot, at the spaces reserved for guests. Before we can get out of the car, he’s walking purposefully our way, wearing a t-shirt that says, Welcome. And so it should be with God’s people, always wearing the welcome of Christ, always walking purposefully toward opportunities to love. […]

We breeze in the back door like windblown leaves turning at the edges, all of us rushing in on the holiday gust. “I’m related to all these people, but I don’t know them,” Zoe said with some awe, us tumbling out of the car and crunching our way through the parking lot, weaving around this […]

“You need to get with it,” I say to Riley, like I do nearly a dozen times a day, then I jot down the phrase. Get with it. I taste the words a little, stare down at the shape of them, the jerking movement of the letters. Kirk Byron Jones has me watching my language […]

“The way the game works,” Zoe says, sitting across the table and all that history, tossing a deck of playing cards back and forth loosely in her hands, “is that you don’t get to know the rules. You have to figure them out as you play.” She and her friend exchange a glance, and friend […]