To look at her, you’d not think her mighty, carrying that slice of notebook paper folded over her fingers, brassy hair tied in two smooth knots and pinned, finally, against her head and away from her face.  She insists upon nothing in her eyes when she’s about her business, checking off important things in a […]

Home and kids settled, I run upstairs and slip on my walking shoes, tugging at the laces.  Sometimes the only thing I know is that I need God.  I slip my keys and my phone in my pocket and promise to be back soon, and I move, carrying water, heavy in one hand.  I’m thirsty, […]

I step down the ladder and balance my paintbrush on the edge of the can, reaching down to trace the paint-tattoo on my knee with one finger.  This now dry glob—when did that happen?–looks like a Maui Mist cloud, all wispy at the edges.  I clench and unclench my hands, sore, noticing the red welts rising like blistering […]

He places the card in my hand, lightly fingering the rough fold, the paper blue like a storm in the middle of the afternoon or the ocean in places very deep.  I look at the flat, incongruent edges and see fibers; wet, bruised pulp; dye on someone’s fingers.  It’s remarkable to see the beginnings of […]

We run in that space just before the sunlight bursts new born, obliterating darkness; in that space where apart from the faithfulness of day, we’d not expect the arrival of Light at all. This is the parenthesis between rain showers, the tar-dark, murky stillness before another downpour, somehow carved for us like a silent pause. […]

A mile from school, Adam’s insulin pod starts beeping, that insistant chirp we once never imagined knowing—one two three, one two three–not an emergency yet, but a countdown to it, and just as the stress knot in my neck begins to ease. “Mom, Adam’s beeping,” Riley says, reporting, as though I can tune out the […]

I don’t know what she first thought when she saw those shoes, empty and waiting carefully, almost in anticipation just there in front of the chair, but I know she recognized them as her father’s.  The knowledge that he would surely need them soon arrested her progress, stopped her cold in the middle of certain […]

They are inside the gas station maybe 5 minutes.  The girls and I wander in while father and son linger at the pump, and then they follow us in, more efficient, by far, than we.  Early morning, and ours is the only vehicle left at at least eight nozzles, though the three dusty spaces beside […]

The funny thing is that none of us remember the original prompt, now—it could have been outer space or video game or teeter totter, but we remember only purse, only the bizarre wrong thing it became when Adam gave up trying to guess.  I’m not sure what it is about our human nature that we store up wrongs. But here […]

I can hear them from the kitchen.  Their laughter–giddy, riotous–bounces and floats, and every so often I catch a “yea, and–“, just the edge of a phrase, the words pointed and stretched for diving in.  They have left this solid, dusty, hungry place for another realm, for a place where garden fairies dressed in glittery leaves co-exist […]