Maggie Menezes Walcott

Do you ever wonder

if people think you’re boring because you don’t have any stories to tell? My daughter’s voice is dropping, a casualty of her metamorphosis, once twelve and now thirteen. I am chopping carrots for soup and thinking about work, or the laundry, or the way the knife is sharp but the sound it makes is a dull thwack, thwack. I wonder if I should tell her how, before she was born, I spent several smooth-bodied years, weighing the pros, debating the cons, considering whether I ever wanted children at all. How the day we brought her home, we strapped all seven pounds of her into a crisply clean car seat, padding her tiny head so it wouldn’t roll around, stopped for Original Recipe fried chicken: the most normal thing I could think to do on the most frightening day of my life. How she won me over, day-by-day, and now I sometimes cry soft tears thinking about how small and fragile she used to be. How edgeless and fragile we all were then.

Deep in the wilds of Northern Michigan, Maggie Menezes Walcott lives with her family in a house they built themselves. She has a grossly unused degree in physical anthropology and has recently returned from a 30-year hiatus to her first calling—creative writing. Her pieces have since been published in Mothers Always Write, The Dunes Review, and Every Day Fiction, among others.