Motherhood by Leshia Stolt

I miss writing like it’s my third child, the abandoned one no one dare ask about above a whisper. She sneaks back home when I’m distracted, sees my piles of laundry and grading, watches as I stretch fractured sleep and optimism thin, before she lowers her head and slips away. I wouldn’t know she’d come, save for the scraps of dialogue in the toy box, the unpolished metaphors in the kitchen sink, and the taste of new characters in the air, like unripened fruit.

Leshia Stolt writes fiction and creative nonfiction. She holds a Master’s degree in English from Indiana State University and is a full-time faculty member at Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana.