An excerpt from “Front Lawn,” a short story published in “Stylus,” and awarded 2nd Place in the Jimenez-Porter Literary Prize.
Molly was a quiet child and quieted more once her brother had gone. There was no one to share their father’s lap during bedtime stories, to play with once the babysitter resided to her cell phone, to hold at the edge of her bed when it was too dark in her room even with the sticker-stars. When Lucas was born, Molly, age three at the time, was enamored with the thought that her parents had so much love that it could fill another person. One evening, she whispered into her brother’s crib, Lucas’s small fingers pinched into fists, his eyes wide with trying to figure out the feeling of light, “I will love you as much as mom and dad.”
She sat in her own silence for what felt like the length of sixteen hundred rulers, if time could be measured in inches. Anxious, but mostly afraid of what her teacher would tell her when she returned, she reached into her backpack and opened her class textbook. She scribbled in the margins of a chapter entitled “Life Science: Where Plants and Animals Live.” She thought about where she lived and what science had to do with it, or if there were equations, chemical or non-, that could explain the change in the word “home” since Lucas had died.
