Mercury

by Amy Jo Burns

boyhood had felt too long, one with too many rules and not enough mercy.

Maybe a need wasn’t met by what you had but by what you never did.

She often wondered whether all women were treated this way, as if motherhood were her inevitable blessing and curse, or whether the world was harder on her because she’d become a mother in the wrong way. Yet when she looked at Theo, she knew there was nothing wrong about it. It was everything else that seemed broken and ready to fall apart.

“Am I a cliché, Marley? People look at me like I’m unoriginal, like I missed my shot. Martyrs aren’t that unique, it turns out.”

Shay wondered whether one person could cause an illness in another. If that was how life passed by, trading wounds through handshakes and family dinners and regret.

“But that’s what loving someone is, isn’t it? Knowing you’re going to let them down. Having to live with it.”

He was content with letting God love only half of him, the way he gave himself to Shay: in pieces. Shay longed for a God who would take all of him, and this was how he loved his family—exactly how he hoped to be loved in return.

She was angry for this woman who had labored her life in secret and died. It was also a cry for Marley herself. A violent wish to be seen, to be granted a voice of her own.