Was there a string I could pull to stop my father from dying? Was there a patch I could secure to block my mother from going away?

There was a drawing of my dad. He was halfway buried in the ground, his arms stretched up and holding on to a bird as it desperately tried to fly away. The expression on my father’s face—panicked, pleading, an expression of sorrow and longing. I looked at the bird, its beak wide open, its one anguished, livid eye.

He was too thin. Too light. Mom needed to make money. We needed more groceries. But I didn’t know how to ask for that either.

The remains of an abandoned hobo camp sat heaped in a corner. The farm conglomerate had pressured the town to empty those encampments a few weeks earlier—that happened a lot during the run-up to planting season. They claimed it was for safety reasons, but everyone knew it really was an attempt to avoid any potential bad publicity if their “smart”

She flew away. She was his mother and then … she wasn’t. She

Children cut from the yellowed paper of eviction notices.

It thrilled me to my core to be taken seriously.

It was January and weirdly warm. The whole world was warm. The deep freezes and wide snowfields that my mother remembered from her youth had transformed to winters that now oscillated between unsettlingly temperate damp and bitter cold.

“mothers fly away like migrating birds. And fathers die too young. This is why farmers have daughters. To keep things going in the meantime, until it’s our time to grow wings. Go soaring away across the sky.”