A Place to Return

The Manifest Station/ December 2024

My 93 year old mother sits in her wheelchair, hunched at the round kitchen table. My father’s seat, empty for a year and a half, remains quietly insistent beside her. His presence exists only in small smiling photos magnetized to the fridge, clipped to a shelf. There used to be a round clock on the wall nearby, part of my mother’s antique collection, but it fell, crashed to the floor a while ago.