A Very Typical Family

by Sierra Godfrey

Natalie was very good at forgetting things she didn’t want to remember. She’d spent fifteen years honing this skill. She was a master at it.

She was slow to react and change, that was the problem. A known flaw. Like the ugly fact that she was thirty-two years old, but her salary was more like that of a twenty-two-year-old, and she was unable to afford rent on her own.

The silence in his wake had been palpable, and then he’d died one day later in a small airplane accident, doubly devastating everyone. This was the root of Natalie’s fear of flying, which she had told no one, not even Teensy.

Hope was the color of midnight blue with a thousand new stars standing out in relief, despite the years of Natalie carefully tending the mental barricade against it.

“We all have difficult choices in life,” he said. “It’s about finding what makes you truly happy and what propels you. What pushes you to fulfillment.”

“I am always amazed by how I hide what makes me happy from myself. I think I hide in my work and use it as a—a kind of shield.”