The Berry Pickers

by Amanda Peters

Fate is a trickster. He likes to set up all the clues just to see if you can put them together and make sense out of things you never thought to make sense of in the first place.

When you’re an only child, semi-imprisoned, books become more than paper between hard cardboard, more than the alphabet organized into words and printed on a page.

Hope is such a wonderful thing until it isn’t.

Some wounds cannot be healed. Some wounds never close, never scar. But the further away from the injury, the easier it became to smile.

“How about a glass of water?” “No, I want another glass of wine.

“Anger is exhausting. Holding on to it will drain the life out of you.”

“Let those tears flow. Alice always said that holding in tears is like holding in pee—it’s gonna hurt eventually, so you might as well let them go as soon as you feel them.”