Call the Canaries Home

by Laura Barrow

I held on to them for all of us because someone had to.

It scared her a little to know she was capable of loving a person so much, that all that love had been waiting there her whole life, like a dormant seed just aching to get out and grow up into something bigger than the cypress trees in the bayou and the pines that shot up all around her yard.

“Look back for too long and you’ll end up with a mess of broken dreams and a crick in your neck.”

In a world that was determined to forget, someone had to do the remembering.

How was it that each of her children knew precisely which buttons to push and how much pressure to apply to shatter her? Then again, maybe it was because they’d spent all those months inside her own body, nestled against her heart, that they knew exactly how to break it.

Dread settled in the bottom of her stomach. How long had it been since she’d last seen her face? Two minutes? Five? How could a single minute suddenly amount to the longest stretch of time in the history of a person’s life?

I hadn’t known my heart was strong enough to break twice.