creative nonfiction

Unravel

I awoke to unravel. The word. The verb. I don’t know why. I listen to my heart beat. Listen to the seemingly endless thud, thud, thud. It pauses and flutters and then as if I hit refresh, continues to bump along. I guess many things would unravel should the beat fail. Unravel, as in fail….

Cattails

My son runs ahead of my husband and I on a thin path that trails off into mudflats. We’ve parked along a narrow road that stops abruptly in front of a dike. We cannot see the water but we can see, just barely, the tops of cattails. We have come here, to the Skagit River…

Plain Jane

Someone once told me angels sang in heaven. The tall man with the black book clasped to his chest greeted us every Sunday. He talked of judgment and error and sin. He talked of angels. I sang in the choir but no one told me I was an angel. They informed me that I was…