My mother weeping in the dark hallway, in the arms of a man, not my father, as I sat at the top of the stairs unnoticed— my mother weeping and pleading for what I didn’t know and can still only imagine— for things to be somehow other than they were, not knowing what I would change, for, or to, or why, only that my mother was weeping in the arms of a man not me, and the rain brought down the winter sky and hid me in the walls that looked on, indifferent to my mother’s weeping, or mine, in the rain that brought down the dark afternoon.
From A Primer on Parallel Lives by Dan Gerber. Copyright © 2007 by Dan Gerber. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.