Your smile is a sunrise.
Its corners climb your cheeks
and draw a blanket of warmth
over this cold, dark world.
And you are still here.

I’m on night journeys,

with tired tyres in heavy water

She was proper, with a good sense of humor, even as the mind wore a heavy frown of dementia. The laughter rose like a hinge between present and memory, a soft echo that refused to be erased. She found reasons to laugh at herself when words tangled and failed to spill from her mouth. We shared the struggle to speak. I listened with more than ears—I listened with patience, with space, with time.

Sometimes I forget that I have a body.

I know. Stick with me here.

I’ve got ADHD. I was diagnosed as a kid.

The strangest thing about having a brain like mine? It’s not the vanishing thoughts or the inability to get through a single recipe unscathed

Cinderella’s stepsister took a knife to her own heel. Sliced clean, blood pooling in the glass slipper like wine in a cup nobody blessed. It fits fine now, doesn’t it? Doves came later and took the sisters’ eyes for the wedding, plucking them out on the church steps while the bells were still ringing.

DISNEY WARNING: Content has been sanitized for optimal merchandising. No feet were harmed in the making of this fairy tale.

Snow White’s stepmother danced. Iron shoes, heated in the fire until they glowed, and they made her dance in them at the wedding until she dropped dead on the floor. Not a curse. A sentence.

DISNEY WARNING: Someday your prince will come. He will not bring hot iron shoes. He will bring bluebirds.

A Parable About the Soul of a Family

The Wedding

The young couple was preparing for their wedding. Ahead of them lay an ocean of family life.