I wait for an hour to speak to someone in customer service, my phone on endless hold, that looping tinny music interspersed with your call is important to us messages playing in the background as I work while also, I am queued online for a chat window. When I clicked the button to chat with […]

In the hallway, I find dots of blood, tiny and faint, each pressed by the ball of a foot, maybe, into a miniature Rorschach, the lot of them an evidential path of wounding I follow from just outside the laundry room all the way down to Adam’s bedroom door, where they abruptly end. I am […]

Every day from the bathroom upstairs where Riley showers, the music pours, pooling on the floor and sliding under the door and seeping through the ceiling until the whole house floods with worship. God, I’m on my knees again/God, I’m begging please again/I need you/Oh, I need you It might as well be that we […]

“In my lifetime, I’ve thrown so many stones,” I’m saying to a close friend, my hand wrapped around a coffee mug, my fingers absently rubbing the shiny porcelain, but what I’m thinking about, what I imagine regretfully, is the cool hardness, the heft, of my judgements and criticisms, gracelessly hurled. What a dark miserable truth, […]

We pull into the hotel parking lot at eleven o’clock at night, the light long since gone and with it, our energy. Adam and I sit in the truck and wait while Kevin goes inside to check in, and I stare out the window looking for stars, counting pools of electric light illuminating the parking […]

“Do you think this is the hardest part, really, this anticipation?” Zoe squints a little, looking at me as she asks this.  In her blue eyes I see a sliver-sharp stretch of sky. We sit on the back porch on a Sunday afternoon, Kevin and Zoe and me, all of us restless and melancholy, sad […]

The first day we visited Graeter’s Ice Cream on the edge of downtown Cincinnati, Jimmy, who is the owner, came out from behind the counter with coloring books and crayons for the kids eating ice cream with their grandma at the table next to ours, and then, walking over to our table with a wide […]

Rain falls outside, a whisper of sound, and looking out the window, through drops like tiny diamonds on the glass, I soak up a saturation of breathing green, the thickness of leaves and wild, dazzling grass. Glancing back toward my phone, the Bible app open, my finger paused on a phrase, I wonder what it […]

Riley comes home from work happy, initiating this, “Hey mom? One of the patients was so kind to me today.” She unloads her arms of purse and coffee cup, then unclips the badge from the collar of her shirt, and I wonder what it is about coming in from a day that we somehow also […]

I’ve been saying all week, unstoppable smile stretching wide, I get to celebrate Adam, meaning that’s at the bottom of everything, and you will think that’s exactly right, as it should be, when I tell you it’s his birthday. Candles with tiny flames will flicker on top of the chocolate Oreo layer cake he requested, […]