A Little Hope

by Ethan Joella

You never know what can break you. What you can fix, what you can stand up to. You never know what time will do, what will defeat or surprise you. You never know.

“We vote because they can no longer vote. We look at the ocean because they can’t. We think about them when we put up a Christmas tree, and later when we sit there and gaze at the lights. We do all the things they can’t. That is how we love them when they’re gone.”

“But the nice thing about chances, I think, is that we don’t know the chances that are coming. There are obvious chances, and hidden chances.”

Living is fixing, living is working on everything that’s wrong—or at least trying your hardest to.

and Ginger Lord decides then she will fix all this for Luke. She will live for him.

She thinks of the courage, win or lose, it takes to live. She wants to be more courageous.

Her warm hand on top of his. He never wants this to end. He wants to put his other hand on top of hers to keep it there.

Her mind keeps putting phrases together that she could write, and once in a while, she’ll reach her hand into the empty cup holder next to her coffee and pick up her cell phone and record an idea she has: In the last year, I have thought of nothing but highways: their long stretch, their openness, the way they take you away from what you know.

Something about grief and hope—how they are two vines of the same—no,

He nods, and turns over, and in a few minutes she hears the sound of him snoring, her husband who battled for his life—and won. His arms crossed in front of him, his long legs stretched. His chest rising and falling. This is still real, she thinks. Nothing, nothing, has happened.