While rushing home, I caught my tiny children abandoned in the woods, injured and unrecognizable. I burst into my parents’ house yelling, “What did you do?!” My sister coldly replied, “You lost your rights.” Before I could react, my dad choked me out. Then, my phone rang with a call from the ICU…

table, eerily silent as a nurse meticulously tweezed splinters from her battered soles and applied iodine to a severe sprain on her left ankle. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t cry. She possessed the blank, thousand-yard stare of a soldier who had outrun the artillery but left her soul back in the trenches.

Why hasn’t my phone rung? The thought pulsed continue reading …