Spectacular Things

by Beck Dorey-Stein

In the surrounding vehicles, tourists roll down their windows and hold up their phones to document the high drama of a drawbridge: how the road rises into a wave of asphalt that eclipses the sun.

His hand is rough but his smile is warm. He reminds her of the stray cat who sometimes sleeps under their porch—Q seems nice enough, but it’s hard to know how he’ll behave if they bring him inside.

Cricket shouts a third time, and Mia turns toward her sister, grief tattooed across her face like winter’s shadow. She is the messenger of death. She is the ruiner of lives. She is familiar but unrecognizable, and so Cricket searches the stands, looking to their missing piece for an explanation, eyes seeking to disprove what her body already knows.

Amid the meows and hisses, the Labrador barks and the hound dog bays that mark the passage of hours and weeks, Mia feels the straight, rigid arrow of her ambition curl in on itself like a sleeping cat. Rather than strive to become as extraordinary as her mom could have been, Mia feels a growing desire to be entirely ordinary. The predictability feels safe, and the safety feels good.

She’s long since stopped wondering why she cries when she does because it’s ultimately always the same reason—she misses her mom. It’s impossible to hold all the sorrow when it blindsides her like it did just now, this tremendous ache of not getting to talk to the one person she really, desperately needs to.

She is coming to understand that love and loss live on the same coin. It’s never heads or tails but joy and agony, grief and delight, spinning in the air, waiting on time and luck to determine not when this chapter ends but how the next one begins.

And there in the pool, Cricket reminds herself, she has been treading water, which isn’t to say she’s been doing nothing. Because treading water means consistent, whole-body work, and actively deciding not to drown, and staying calm about not drowning, and continuing to push in one place even as fatigue settles in and threatens to pull her under or push her out.

the nursery is bursting with potential energy, like a classroom before the first day of school, right before life rips through it.

It is easy to be gracious from the number-one spot,