by Andrea Lynn Koohi

But there’s something to help. It’s in the cupboard, second shelf, between the multi-vitamin and
fish oil supplement, among all the things I keep to save us: Twizzlers. We’ll do what we did
when you were five, when your fish disappeared and you found his corpse stuck to the water
filter. We’ll bite off the ends of the twisty ropes and use them as straws in glasses of milk –
straws like syringes dispensing sweet medicine. Believing, they say, is half the battle, so I hand
you the Twizzler and hand you the milk, and wait for you. Your smile.