Impatient and expectant, we waited all weekend for Arthur to proclaim his presence. On a mountain road, on the day he would have turned twenty-five, I squealed with excitement, without explanation, for Marguérite to pull over. She understood. Standing beside the car, arm in arm, we waved, laughed through our tears at the rainbow, at our boy. Each color was a memory: cowlick, round face, dimples, mischievous smile, tracheostomy scars, quacking laughter, industrial sounds of the machine we used to empty his lungs of the mucus they couldn’t excrete. Broken at birth, Arthur had shown us all how to live.
Krissie Mulvoy Williams finds time to write when she's not teaching French or hanging with her husband, three teenagers, and black Lab.