Creation
The paperwork takes up an entire three-ring binder, a fat brick that is the sum of all they are. There were home visits and fingerprints at the local police department, their fingers stained black with the insinuation that they might not be fit parents. Of course they aren't. Is anyone, ever? Who can know the sowing and reaping that is parenthood, the soil that drinks but is ever thirsty, eats but is never full? Still, they are pregnant with longing. The crib is soft and ready, lined with sheets the color of a pink peony, a ballet slipper, hope. Their arms ache. It is an undoing, the genesis of a world already broken, born of loss. A lifetime later (knowing all they can know), they would do it and do it again, a little better every time. Realizing it was never about them and never will be.

Fall
She remembers reading a poem about a farmer crushing the head of a kitten beneath his heel. It was an act of terrible grace because the runt—unable to keep up with his littermates—had been trampled by a wayward cow. "Farm life," her father said when she showed him the poem in her eighth grade English textbook. As if those two words explained everything. The savage equation of life and death, of impossible choices laid bare, of awful things turned beautiful in the strange alchemy of mercy. She wonders now if he shed a tear, the farmer cradling that small, still-warm body in his work-scarred hands. If he wished for just a moment that he could explain how sometimes love splinters and breaks, bone on bone, and is still love.

Redemption
He is forced to lay a palm on his bent leg, just above the knee, to lever himself up the final step. He's late, and the bleachers are full, and when he finally sinks to the metal bench he understands: he is old. It's an irrevocable knowing, as sharp and clean as a paper cut that doesn't sting until the first bead of blood. And then, it aches. Throbbing high and hot with the sick-sweet scent of sweat on the court, salty popcorn in the stands. The squeak of rubber and wood glossed to lacquer is a symphony—and it used to be him on that floor. He can still feel his heart beat in time with the ball as he toes the free throw line, coils, springs, lets go. Sometimes it seems that's all he does. Sometimes it's enough. Often it is too much. The weight of everything he was and is and will yet be, a burden too wonderful to bear.


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