When we moved out of my first home my mother went room to room saying goodbye. She stood a while on the patio, by the too-warm pool where some of my stories have lingered. She used to keep pieces of wood she’d rescued from riversides in a “prayer area” in the den: gnarled with ripples, endlessly ebbing. Hers was a practice saved from Baptism, soaked in quiet Methodism, rubbed with Buddhist oils, beginning and returning to breath. She went room to room placing farewells and I trailed behind, clutching a branch, leaving childhood like removing a hand from a stream.

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Cade Stone is a Washington, DC-based writer originally from Austin, TX. He works in communications and writes in order to avoid dwelling too much on that. His work has been published in The Blood Pudding, Full House Literary, Neuro Logical Magazine, and elsewhere. More can be found at cadestone.me