Three Minus One: Stories of Parents' Love and Loss by Jessica Watson

of greeting visitors
The worry how a soldier will soon learn
His child is gone—the sudden anger when
A friend, who tries to help, just makes things worse.
    First published in
The Stray Branch
(Spring/Summer 2012).

4 a.m.
    Jane Blanchard
    The dream recurs
often enough
to be unsettling
except that the infant,
sometimes a girl,
sometimes a boy,
is always
so calm,
so comfortable,
in my arms.
    Is this the one
lost in the womb,
held only as a longing
in the early morning?
    First published in
The Seventh Quarry
(Summer 2013).

The Hatbox
    Kelly Smith
    T he air was thick with the smell of sweet summer wheat as my daughter Halle and I rummaged through old items in the living room closet. We were moving in just a few weeks and this was the last “room” to be tackled. I’d saved it for last because it was the catchall of the whole house and a complete disaster. Board games, craft supplies, and old boxes of baseball cards were all bulging out over the edges of overly burdened shelves. Beads of sweat pearled at my nape as I shoved things aside and tried to group the chaos into piles that made sense.
    Halle’s breath caught, and I turned to see her gaping at something she’d just pulled from the back corner. A padded hatbox covered in thin, gauzy fabric, it was certainly intriguing, especially so to a little girl. Against the green stood gold-leaved tulips embossed deeply, frozen forever in perpetual bloom. The rounded shape of the box brought to mind the fine ones of old; the kind that made you wish you had a stiff brimmed hat to put inside, maybe one that was tall with a luxurious flower placed just so, pink silk ribbons trailing down the back. The kind of hat Rhett would give Scarlett; just the sort of thing a little girl could appreciate. Thick gold ribbon lined the base of the lid, drew the eye, and begged the casual passerby to pause, even if just for a moment, to lift the lid and have a quick peek inside.
    I ran my hand gingerly over the fabric, tracing the glittering threads that ran around each meticulous flower. I closed my eyes, myhand trembling upon the box, my heart racing, palms wet. Unlike my daughter, I knew very well what was buried inside.
    “Can we open it, Mom?” she asked breathlessly, excited about the goodies she was sure we’d discover.
    “I’m not sure this is the time, sweetheart,” I said carefully, watching her face fall with disappointment and knowing even then she wouldn’t be dissuaded. “Maybe Daddy can show you later. There’s nothing exciting inside anyway,” I told her. “Just some stuff that belonged to your brother.”
    “That’s okay!” she said, brightening. “I still want to open it!”
    There was a time when the sight of the hatbox could turn my blood to ice. A time when I hid it from myself just so I wouldn’t see it by mistake. I was always moving it, always hoping the new spot would afford me a reprieve and that, this time, it was truly hidden. But there’d been more than a handful of times when, standing on tiptoe to shuffle things around on a dusty attic shelf, or lying facedown on the floor to stretch underneath the bed frame in a perpetual search for that one basket that was just the right size or for the stupid Christmas wreath that hangs on the front door, I’d been unexpectedly surprised by the box sitting innocently behind broken picture frames and high school band instruments. It was always a sucker punch to the stomach.
    I suppose if I’d really wanted to, I could have just refused her, made up a story, or changed the subject. Trains of thought are not so hard to derail in five-year-old minds. But I was tired: tired of hiding from the box; tired of moving it only to have it find me again; tired of being afraid. I smiled at her then, nodded, took the box from her, and placed it on the floor. We knelt down in the small closet, the box between us. I held my breath and pulled the lid from the top.
    Carefully placed inside were the small pieces of me that I’d