Mercury

by Amy Jo Burns

“Men do things, and women apologize for them.”

one body will want another when it snows.

That girl got herself knocked up. As if, by some miracle, she’d achieved it without the aid of a man.

They dared to be happy, and they were.

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

The arc of a mother’s life shouldn’t have self-sacrifice as its inevitable pinnacle.

Sometimes a secret was all a woman had to call her own.

marriages were not measured by time. They were tracked by disappointments, by hurts. Betrayals and apologies.

wondered whether this was how you truly loved someone—to look upon their worst act and never let them know that you had seen it.

“You don’t become an itinerant preacher by pleasing people.”

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