A World of Speculation

Stealing Time

I creep through the house in the dark morning And find time lying abandoned in pools of night: Tossed into corners, scattered on the floor, jumbled on the chairs. I take an hour, maybe two, and use them for my own purposes. Who will know? I will. My conscience nags....
Icons shine at Orthodox Writers Week at the Beach

Icons shine at Orthodox Writers Week at the Beach

Not everyone at Orthodox Writers Week at the Beach this year worked in paper or pixels. Orthodox iconographer Heather MacKean’s project took the form of egg tempera paint on a wooden board. The icon, Saints of North America, features eight standing saints from North...

I Become the Murderer’s Mom

I walked back to the car seeing nothing but the putty-colored wet sidewalk under my feet. As I walked by the door to the lecture room where the parents were, I heard a woman give a wail of grief. I shivered at the pain and terror and wondered if it was Angela. I tried...

Questions about Melody

Neither of the two men looked back at me as they walked. Our footsteps echoed in the empty corridor, and my feet were still cold and from standing in the rain. But mostly I saw the backs of their suits, dark as black in the greenish hallway light, as if they were a...

Falling Water

If the shooting was at 10:15, and I got to the campus at 11, then we parents must have been standing in the rain for an hour and a half or two hours before they opened a lecture room and let us sit down.Every once in a while, an administrator would come to the podium,...