Creative Nonfiction

My neighbor looked at me quizzically, and I felt it again: a twinge of guilt for taking comfort in the global health crisis.

By the time I shut off the husband’s alarm, boil water, mix up the baby’s bottle, and empty my bladder, the baby’s room is suspiciously quiet.

The more I wandered, the more I wanted to wander. Movement gave me direction, and after finishing the Appalachian Trail, I spent years traveling, hiking, becoming.

But one week is not yet a pattern, not yet a reprieve from the tentacles of hypervigilance that buoy her and slowly strangle us.

When I think of my children, I see them almost as Russian nesting dolls, each containing within them all their prior selves.

This was the sudden loss of a forty-six-year-old man who had decades of life sliced away from him.

But it’s one thing to be a human incubator, and another to be a mother, and I just didn’t know if I would love my second son like I loved my first…

I’m making dinner when my teenage son walks into the kitchen. “You’re never going to be a grandmother, you know,” he says, apropos of nothing.

More than staring, though, I smelled him. I touched my cheek to his and gently sniffed the tiny bowl made by his collarbone.

Our children didn’t survive. Saying it this way makes me feel like a homesteader in a daguerreotype photograph.

Ghost stories, it turns out, are only fun when they occupy the space between belief and skepticism.