The Cloisters

by Katy Hays

had already learned that no one wanted to hear what loss was really like.

But that was the hardest thing about death: the unrelenting march of time forward, away from the person you’ve lost.

But my father was like the putty that had filled in the sharp cracks between my mother and me, the places where we didn’t fit, and without that putty, we kept running up against each other, all hard angles and brittleness.