Thirty-seven years later

It didn’t hit you when you lost an old relative or a pet. It hit you when you lost someone your age. A good friend. Sixteen years old. Back when you still believed in Forever. When you finally understood that life was finite. Death transmuted from an amorphous concept into something so real it eviscerated your heart. […]

From the other side of death

An excerpt from The Savior of Turk. After I died, I figured I’d possess a clear memory of my whole life, from the day I popped out of my mama’s belly till they put a sheet over my head at the hospital. In eternity, I had in mind that I’d go back and forth over […]

Burying Aunt Imo

 We buried Aunt Imo on the last day of August when Northwest Missouri was suffering through another year of drought. Grass had turned the color of dank wheat from the lack of water, and trees had begun to shed their prematurely-dying leaves. A cold front pushed through, leaving the day overcast, cool and breezy. It […]