Footsteps up the driveway, hours too early. Clinking of keys on the hook, coins in the can, wallet on the counter.
After I'd eaten breakfast, I went outside. It was cool, the sun earnest but dew still dampening the grass.
“We’ve been coming here for six weeks, and it works for J and I, but does it work for our son? Will they love him and his differences?”
It only happened once and even in his locked-up world he appeared to immediately realize his mistake.
I fill the trough with feed and the sisters rustle and squawk and flap their landlocked wings. A few black-and-white feathers go flying over the shed beams.
We passed a line of peahens. “I wish we’d passed elephants,” she said.
On my first time down as a certified scuba diver, I marveled over an extraordinarily large manta ray with its twenty-five-foot-wide wings until it aimed for me head on, its broad mouth open.
I’m two, maybe three, wearing a baggy diaper and standing in shin-deep puddle water. Leah’s here too, all pigtails and chubby legs and chubby cheeks.
A photograph of Seth and Abby flashes, the sun’s gleam nothing compared to those on their faces. Happy two years. Perhaps I shouldn’t have stopped seeing Sean.
She called him Peeg. He was a stuffed pig born at IKEA, on a trip when I needed candles and she needed distraction.
The pastor raises his hands and loosely smiles at the Sunday regular crowd. Satisfied, he begins his prayer. "Dear Lord, let our children find prosperity . . . "
I’m in the ER with a kidney stone. There’s an IV for the pain.
Man, what a tough crowd.
It looked like a police lineup for little kids. Three sisters, ages nine, five and almost four, and one pacing adult.
I’m in my final year of high school and recently announced plans to go to art school, a life-long dream.
Remember when our dreams were simply slips of paper, scrawled in minutes, torn with careless confidence, and tacked to beams that crossed through darkness overhead in the attic above your room?
I danced along the village street and a couple called from their rose garden.
I’m helping Jessie cook chicken in the wok. It’s cold outside, but warm in here.
It’s called sewing-machine leg, that quiver in a calf that borders on cramp. I’m clinging to the rock face like a limpet, fingertips raw, adrenaline coursing.
A tiny human just tried to shove me down the basement stairs. And giggled about it.