Tilt: A Novel

by Emma Pattee

You will not be like me, little kidney Bean. You will not chain yourself to a dream so big, so heavy, that you will spend years hauling it behind you, falling further and further behind until you turn to try to let it go and realize you can’t. The chains are gone; they’ve been gone for years. You are the chain.

He moved to Portland to escape his childhood, and now he wants to move somewhere else to escape his adulthood.

I cannot explain what happened next, only that Taylor and I did not need to speak. We both simply understood what we had to do, and we knelt beside that woman in the silk blouse and her screams left her mouth and entered our bodies and the three of us held the tender weight of that child’s body and rocked and wailed together, a strange, beautiful sound, and for a moment, her Ava was still alive, was still here with us.