“You may not understand this now, but she isn’t coming back. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Day after that. And no, she hasn’t left anything behind — a sticky note on the refrigerator door or a quick message for the answering machine, her voice a distant echo calling your name and mine. Nothing. I’m sorry because I know you get scared when the wind blows hard like this at night, when the shadows on your ceiling shuffle as if they’ve been alive all this time. But I’m right here. And the sun will not rise for another few hours and the birds outside are still sleeping —remember Johnjohn, your favorite cardinals nestled in the Sweet Gum tree down by the mailbox? The babies wrapped in small, ruby feathers. That’s how you should be right now. Dreaming and resting and not worrying.”
—The New York Times featured this excerpt from “To a Restless Little Brother Calling for Mama in His Sleep,” an essay by young writer Victoria Ford, who won a $10,000 Scholastic Art and Writing Award (she joins a list of honorees that include Truman Capote, Joyce Carol Oates, and Sylvia Plath). The feature story on Ford discusses her Tennessean family’s fall from prominence and how her family’s stories inspired her writing.
