Only the Beautiful

by Susan Meissner

A home for unwed mothers, then. That’s where I’m headed, since apparently no one else will take me the way I am. Seventeen. Orphaned. Pregnant.

Why aren’t there places like that for fallen men, I wonder, where they are tsked and told every day that their recklessness has led to disaster?

Let me just say that you don’t have to try to live up to something that never fit you in the first place.