Stephanie Nawrocki

And now, years later, my mother is noticing the fingerprints against the wall — remnants of my service to The Eight.

The three words do not feel ambiguous because they simply are.

Rotted shingles decorated the sides of the houses and broken gutters flooded poorly kept lawns, resulting in patches of mud and cracked earth during the summer—which was also when all of the windows were wide open, so when we were…

Three: Times I knocked on the front door of the house that dad’s staying at before I received an answer. I don’t mean that I knocked one-two-three times and stood patiently in the rain. I mean I knocked on three separate occasions on three separate days that all took place coincidentally on a damp fall morning.

If (prepare yourselves for this ambiguous word) love in general resembles the heart monitor in the hospital, then I don’t want it to ever flat-line.

“He’s our second chance” my mom wearily stated from across the hospital room, in sync with the consistent beeps from the machines that that sang her heart rate.

The karaoke microphone squealed in protest to being handed to the next singing contestant.

A friend of mine that served two tours in Afghanistan once told me that he would spend the entire day in the blistering desert heat filling sandbags with his small portable shovel. While the rest of his friends relaxed and killed time between orders, he would stack these burlap sacks of sand higher and higher…

The two types of people in this world are listeners and writers.