It was late August, last August; the baby had been dead five years. Her absence hung in my chest and thickened like a bell that grew more silent with time.
Some cultures have names for such hauntings, by sickly, sticky children who didn’t get to live—the myling in Sweden, the bird rider in Korea. These little ghosts are spiky, fickle, as liable to help the living as to strangle their mothers by the neck. I was not so lucky. I received no aid nor was I relieved of my life, but continued to drive life’s circuit. So it was I found myself a block from the middle school, stopped at a light. Midmorning, mid-August, and also, I feared, the middle of my life.
Then I looked to my right.
Across the empty passenger seat, across an empty lot, above flowering weeds that knotted and bowed above the chunked asphalt like...