Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

by Katie Yee

Noah has a wild-eyed urgency about him. Everything is an emergency. He knows about the earth. These days, kids learn words like extinct and endangered earlier than they used to. He wants to see everything before it’s too late. My son, wanting to race death. It almost feels like he knows about me, somehow. Every time he says “before it’s too late” and “while we still can,” I feel the lump in my chest and fear my own personal extinction.

Lifting my daughter is now a strenuous activity. For a whole month, I can’t pick her up, and I can’t tell her why.

The whole evening, I couldn’t stop complimenting her, for lack of something to say. There was that need to fill the void again: recognizing an emptiness and seeing yourself fit inside it.

“How do you feel?” “You know it’s not over,” I say. “Not ever. Not really.”