Where Night Stops

My ribs crackled with pain when I coughed. Bruises peppered my body. Still, I’d healed enough to be able to walk out. The nurse insisted I exit by wheelchair. Hospital rules. “We wheel you in, we wheel you out,” she said, gliding me down the Windstop Memorial General’s off-white corridors. The odor of urine and pine needles, of desperation masked by cleaning supplies, filled the entire place.

I’d been born in that building and had ventured back numerous times. These were the people who stitched my head after the diving board interrupted my backflip, cut out my tonsils, freed my Krazy Glued fingers, and diagnosed the rash speckling my skin as a case of flea bites—courtesy of Mackerel. These were my neighbors, fellow church members, the parents and relatives of my classmates, the people my family and I depended on in times of emergency.

In the lobby, the summer light pounded through the windows, sharp and blinding. Outside, a world I wasn’t ready for waited.

I had the