When it comes time to periodically refresh my supply of stories, essays, and poems begging for acceptance on a variety of editor’s desks and hard drives around the globe, I inevitably feel like an adoption broker in an age where there are millions of great orphans, but only a hundred stable parents who might be willing to take one in, give him a good home, and love him forever. . .
Jesus hangs on the cross right over the marital bed, blessing all things great and small. The mother, brow furrowed, sits in the hard chair, worrying her hands, intermittently reaching out to her children who breeze in and out of the room. . .
Annie in the shadows, a shadow herself, shoes off, creeping barefoot through the moon-radiant street, all the way to the church with its windows blank and its door shut fast. And Annie, with a soft-mewling babe cradled in her arms, and the church door locked against her, and her small fist making little noise on the cold wood. . .
The dirt from the empty graves had formed mounds. Piled loose and high, to the yawning rectangles of the graves the mounds were an antithesis. Their lack gave the graves definition, yet made them still incomplete, left them waiting to be filled, which they would never be. . .