Foster

by Claire Keegan

At the end of the lane there’s a long, white house with trees whose limbs are trailing the ground. ‘Da,’ I say. ‘The trees.’ ‘What about ’em?’ ‘They’re sick,’ I say. ‘They’re weeping willows,’ he says, and clears his throat.

I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.

Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

Maybe the way back will somehow make sense of the coming.