Signal Fires

by Dani Shapiro

She is lovelier than ever, but it is her sadness that lights her from within.

She is incandescent in her misery.

To fold into himself again and again like an origami puzzle until he’s small enough to be overlooked.

He will move through his life, as we all do, without knowing what has preceded him or what lies ahead.

His idiotic, careless, carefree children who, at least until this night, hadn’t yet lived long enough to understand that there are fates from which their parents can’t save them.

They will know only that there is a bit of magic and unexpected beauty, here in this unlikely spot.

It is only in deepest slumber that he meets his young self, that frightened, awkward boy he has worked so hard, all his adult life, to leave behind.

There are very few lines, once crossed, that come to define you forever. If you have children, you are a mother. If you kill someone, you are a murderer. If you aid and abet, you are an accomplice. If you fuck someone other than your husband, you are an adulterer. She is all these things. Remember we took pictures.

My life closed twice before its close.

You told me that Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky.”

His dad likes to pretend at strength, but it is his mom who is actually strong.

It was a kind of relief, to no longer feel that he had to fix things.

haunted, silenced for decades by their own terror and shame.

lesson among many during the pandemic is that plans are mere fantasies.

The atmosphere is weighted with grief as if grief were a tangible thing, a presence rather than an absence. And yet at the center of his life, his hearth, his kitchen, in the restaurant he has