I examined my blood blister. This is how marriages fall apart, Sailor. Not over infidelity or even lack of love, but over batteries, antibiotics, car seats.

The people around me gave up on talking once you were born. They stopped exchanging ideas and thoughts; they just made noise. Constant, unrelenting, peevish noise. Not us. We three didn’t make a sound.

Oh Sailor, I thought, the little size of you. This is what it feels like when everything goes wrong, and by your own hand. When you are caught, cornered, the one to blame, when you discover something in your nature that you did not know was there and which you do not like. You know what, though? Confusion, shame, resentment, regret: it’s my area. D

The imperative to get my fill of summer before it ended although it had not yet begun.

From the outside a woman cradling a newborn looks peaceful. A new mother is not peaceful but in a jittery state of high alert. We declare her serene so we can leave her to it. So we can behold the glittering surface, remark on its beauty, and walk away.

ran as if I had an assignation, as if I would meet my self at the end of the road, the old me, the real me, find her waiting on the corner. I would tell her that she was free. She had not known about her freedom. Only in losing it did she understand what she had lost.

My husband used to answer the phone to me with Hey, pronouncing it in such a way I could hear he was smiling.

Now here I was, the lapsed vegetarian, in a butcher’s of all places, with a buggy of all things, buying half a pound of flesh I didn’t want. I glanced around the shop. Were we all wondering how it had come to this?

was you there, Sailor, dying in the grass with no one to help you because everything vulnerable was you, everything tender was you those days, and these days, and very possibly all my days.