Gallant

in her mind a family was a sprawling thing, an orchard full of roots and branches.

Free—a small word for such a magnificent thing.

Sometimes, right after she wakes, there is a kind of filament, like spider silk, clinging to her skin. That strange sense of something just out of reach, an image bobbing on the surface before rippling away. But then it’s gone.

She, who wanted to scream, not in pain but sheer exasperated fury that there was so much noise inside her, and she could not let it out.

“In my dreams, I am always losing you. In my waking, you are already lost.”

Her mother, who has always been a mystery, an empty space, an outline, the edges just firm enough to mark the absence