Mercury

by Amy Jo Burns

But his father had built so many things in his life that he never bothered to take care of. Houses, marriages, sons.

Shay loved best when he said, Show me your worst thing. I promise I won’t look away.

What did it mean, Marley wondered, to be married to one Joseph, but wife or mother to them all?

I have no escape. You get to escape because I can’t.”

It frightened her already, the ways she was becoming just like Elise. The martyr, the cook. The woman of the house who resented her husband.

Shay had been taught that God was too pure to look upon sin. And Shay wondered, then, what on earth there was left to look at—if not people hurting each other, misunderstanding each other, missing each other.

“Tell me,” Shay said. “Do you think God is a man or a woman?” “I’d say God isn’t an or,” Lennox answered. “God is an and.”