Back to Issue 11.

The Nature of Things

Julia Walton

The sun was setting. Agnes crouched on the floor of her bedroom, tucked in the narrow lane between the bed and the wall. This was where Robert used to pass every day to climb in and out of his side of the bed, and it was also where Agnes always went to cry. In her hands, her phone cast a stark and unnatural rectangle of light. She was already crying. Out the window, the black tree branches framed thin lines against the red sky. She wondered if there was a window in the hospital room—if he, too, could see the contracting prism of the sunset.      

Robert lay in the hospital bed with three or four pillows behind him, his face sallow and covered in sweat, his eyes half-open. A plastic tube had been inserted down through his mouth into his trachea. Now it mechanically filled his lungs with air. In and out. His arms were still tied to the rails of the bed from when he had been hyperventilating.

“Robbie,” Agnes was saying. “Can you hear me? I love you. I love you.” To make sure he might hear her over the whir and beeping of machines, she was almost shouting, but her throat was closing, making her sound like someone she didn’t recognize, like some kind of keening animal.

The whites of his eyes were dull and bloodshot, the corners of his eyes crusted with dried fluid. Lines of hair clung to his damp forehead. His vision didn’t focus, and he lay there inert. 

“I’m so sorry, baby, I wish I could come, but I can’t come. I love you. Elliot loves you. We’re safe out here, and we miss you, but you’re gonna see us soon.” 

She didn’t know what she was saying. He didn’t believe in the afterlife—he was dogmatic like that—and she had never come to any conclusions herself. She was never an eloquent speaker, and maybe, if things had been different, she wouldn’t have done much more than sit there and hold him. But now, there was nothing else to do except keep stringing together words she didn’t have enough time to consider. “I miss you so much, but we’re gonna be… we’re gonna be OK. I’m gonna miss you so much, Robbie.”

“We’re with him,” the nurse holding the phone cut in. “We’re gonna be with him the whole way.” Even though all she could see was Robert, Agnes felt the weight of this stranger’s presence across her whole body: the nurse’s eyes, her ears, taking in everything Agnes was saying and doing, things Agnes should have been doing alone with him. How many times had the nurse done this already? Was this nothing to her now? Agnes ignored her.

Suddenly, all she could think about was her terror. Robert would never look into her face again. “Baby, can you hear me? Can you look up for me?” Agnes asked.

His mouth fell open slightly. For a second Agnes thought he might try to speak. Then a bubble of pink fluid grew in his nose and stayed there. The machines on his left and right began to beep wildly. “Rob?” she asked, louder. “Robert?” The nurse called out something she didn’t understand, then whispered an expletive as she flipped the camera view around, maybe      accidentally. Agnes caught a blurred moment of the nurse’s mask, her goggles, her vivid blue plastic hood before the video call ended. In that moment, Agnes experienced a powerful sensation of tearing inside her chest.

The tiles of apps reappeared, and past them, Agnes could see her background, a picture of Robert in his field research gear—his khaki shorts, backpack, baseball hat, and hiking boots—standing triumphantly on a rock that overlooked a stunning mountain and valley. 

Agnes turned off the phone. She put it on the ground next to her. She looked around at the walls and experienced them as simultaneously real and unreal. She saw the books strewn and stacked across the dresser, her brushes and vials, the glossy photos and paintings in their frames. Time had slowed to a singularity, where each moment bore the same horrific attribute: that of being the first second in a world where Robert did not exist—the second—the third.

When Agnes stopped to breathe, she could finally hear Elliot screaming across the hallway. Her mind was empty as she pulled herself to her feet and wiped her nose. Her whole body felt weak. In the hallway, she tripped on the edge of the rug and found herself clutching at the banister. 

Elliot was screaming so much his forehead had bunched into painful-looking folds. He held onto the rails of the crib with tiny fists, stamping. He wailed “Mama” and other, less comprehensible words. She picked him up, bouncing him and walking in circles, saying shh-shh, shh-shh. His tears were hot against her cheek and he didn’t stop crying. 

After a few minutes, like some kind of mechanism had been activated inside her, Agnes put him down in the crib, untangled his arms from around her neck, and walked out of the room. She didn’t know where she was going. In the end, it was downstairs. She saw the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and sat in it. The echo of her crying child rang through the house. Otherwise, every other particle around her remained perfectly still, articulating an unbearable silence. 

Eventually, the landline started ringing, but Agnes didn’t pick it up. Even when a woman’s voice started to leave a message, Agnes didn’t listen to what it said. While staring at her hands on the kitchen table, she entertained the fantasy of getting in the car, rushing to the hospital, and forcing her way through crowds of overworked nurses in order to see Robert’s body. She was overwhelmed with the desire to hold his body. It was still out there—she could see it before they took it away—and it was still him, the familiar arms, the weight of his chest. The small wrinkles on the skin of his face where the sun burned him too many times. Maybe they would put him in one of the freezer trucks they had now, stacking him in a pile with the other bodies. Maybe she would go straight there.

She could hear him talking sense: One, he was dead. Two, she’d get sick. Then who would take care of the baby? So she kept sitting there. 

She began to sob. She slammed her fist on the table repeatedly in a tearful rage. She was filled with an intense hatred for the nurse, who, during the call, had been holding her husband’s hand. 

***

They were still unpacking the boxes in the house when Robert had to pack his suitcases again. He had gathered things from the dresser and arranged them in piles on the floor. While they were talking, he went in and out of the bedroom—to the hallway to grab something from the closet, or to rummage through the boxes lined up against the bannister—calling out his responses through the doorway. 

“Sometimes I get so sick of the wolves,” he joked. From the door, he threw a binder full of documents on the ground next to Agnes and went back out again. She laughed, took a sweater from the ground, and folded it neatly. “They’re the only damned thing I talk about anymore. I keep finding myself wishing they would go extinct again. In the park, anyway. Isn’t that horrible?”

“Yes, it is,” she said, smiling. “I thought they were your life’s work.”

“Yeah, well, last decade’s work, anyway.” Now he had the camera, with its enormous bag of lenses, the tripod, and the case of micro SDs. 

“You don’t mean that,” she murmured as he put the items down by the door. 

It was too straightforward, with an edge of dissatisfaction. Instantly, she regretted having said it, and she distracted herself by folding another sweater. There was a different current in the conversation now. 

“About the wolves?” he said, with what seemed like feigned surprise. “Sure I do. We’ve written so many papers on them already. I don’t know why Steve wants us to write another one so urgently. Especially since we’re not even teaching together anymore.”

Agnes fiddled with the tag on the sweater’s inside collar. L. L. Bean, size large.  

“It’s OK,” she said. “You don’t have to pretend. I know you didn’t really need to be convinced. It’s a co-authorship, and Yellowstone, and money. We need the money. Why wouldn’t you go?”

Robert leaned back against the foot of the bed and sighed. They looked at each other. She didn’t want to be confrontational. She gave him a helpless, open look.

“No, you’re right,” he said, laughing a little bit. “I’m sorry. I thought it would make you feel better if I said it like that.”

“You told him no before,” she said. “But he asked again. And you said yes.”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s really just a few weeks?”

“Yeah, the study is only four weeks long.”

The window was open. Cool air floated in with the sigh of leaves. For a few seconds, she looked past the tree branches to the woman jogging on the sidewalk across the street. 

She recanted. “How’s he doing, Steve?” she said. 

“Well, he’s jealous of me, definitely,” he said. “I know I keep saying this, but I can’t believe I got it. The position—I mean, considering the market anymore. All those shiny new PhDs.”

“Yeah.” She had been so proud of him. He had come home that day with two bottles of wine, and they had killed both of them. She had a vivid memory of his open belt buckle catching on the door of their old bedroom, which was smaller than the one they had now, and painted with darker, warmer colors. They had laughed so hard they almost exhausted themselves just from that.

“If I had gotten tenure back there, we would have been stuck for years,” he continued when she didn’t volunteer anything else, defaulting to a well-worn, optimistic line of conversation. “This is a better place to live. I know it’s weird, but we’ll get used to it. We’ll be able to give Elliot everything he needs. Schools, everything. Sure, it’s not so close to the research, but I don’t mind the flights.”

“I think so too,” she said, though she wasn’t sure which part of what he had said she was responding to. She looked down at the stacks of clothes, gear, papers. She half-smiled. 

“Hey,” he said, standing up. The current changed again. 

She stood up. They hugged. 

“I just wish you weren’t going,” she said, quietly, past his ear. “Yes, the town is beautiful—I guess I’ve just been stuck at home so long with him. And you’re going.”

“I know,” he said. “It won’t be long. I’ll be back.”

“And my mom is far—and I don’t know if I’m gonna feel like inviting anyone new over if you’re not around—” She didn’t know how to finish.

He waited a second. Then he said, “Hey, look at me.” 

She pulled back to see his face. His eyes were straight on her.

“Everything balances out,” he said. And he spoke with the certainty he always did when that light was in his eyes. “Nature, life. I know things are strange right now. Equilibrium—we’ll find it again. You’ll find it again.”  

Agnes thought about that conversation now, in the kitchen. She thought about the wolves, with their pointed faces. She thought about the rain pooling into the rivers, where the willows, now unaccosted by elk, grow roots to hold the banks together. Where the willows put out branches as homes for songbirds. She thought about the beavers, badgers, eagles, foxes; the tiny fish who lived in the still pools made by willow dams; the numbers of the populations going up and down in their connected dance; the sine graph of it; the shaping of the slow movements of the landscape.

“It’ll be just a few weeks,” he said.

He didn’t know that he would get sick. Or that the pathogen in question, rapidly breaking loose from its native cradle, would be airborne. If they had been able to talk after the public learned these details, he would have told her he was impressed by the mechanism: latency in the host for weeks, while the host became infectious long before coming down with symptoms. The fatality rate was 10% and affected the young and old equally; it didn’t seem to mind the summer heat. The pundits, screaming at their more complacent colleagues on the evening news, were calling it “the one that could end civilization if we don’t do something now.” 

He didn’t know that when he tried to come home, they would screen everyone coming off the planes at the airport, and that the results of that test would allow them to take him away. He didn’t know that the wheels of their society, with their well-oiled, mechanical parts, would nearly stop turning as people began to refuse to leave their homes. He didn’t expect that she would not be allowed to see him. 

He didn’t know that he was wrong—that the circle of things would be broken, and that equilibrium, for her, could never possibly be achieved again.

***

It had been one week since Robert died. Agnes hadn’t stopped crying for more than an hour at a time. They had cremated his body; his ashes were on their way to her in the mail. She had found this out when, finally, she had called the hospital, and a man on the other end (almost inaudible over the chaotic noin the background) rummaged through stacks of paper reports to find what to tell her. She had been lucky, the man had told her, because soon they would have to start cremating en masse.

Agnes sat      on the couch while Elliot played with his blocks on the ground. Sometimes he looked up at her, as if expecting something, and when she smiled weakly at him, he seemed satisfied and turned back around, knocking the blocks together over and over. The evening report read, “100,000 DEAD IN FIRST FOUR WEEKS OF NATIONAL LOCKDOWN.” The gravity did not affect her. She stared blankly at the passing images of empty cities and prone bodies lying on the floors of hospitals     . The wind knocked branches against the windows.

Agnes’s phone, sitting next to her, began to vibrate. She picked it up.

“Hi, Mom,” she said. She leaned back further into the couch cushions.

“Hi, sweetie,” her mother said, very carefully. “I didn’t know if you would answer.”

Agnes wanted to cry again, but she had discovered there’s a point at which you’ve cried too much, and you can’t anymore. But she still felt heavy, like she couldn’t breathe.     

“Well, you know.” Her voice sounded hoarse. She hadn’t heard it in days. She hadn’t been speaking at all, even to Elliot.

“Of course, honey,” her mother said. “You know I would have been there immediately—”

“I know,” Agnes said, closing her eyes.

“I’m worried about you. Are you going to be able to take care of yourself? What about Elliot, is he OK?”

Agnes took a long breath in. While she tried to think of what to say, her mother didn’t try to ask again. Maybe her mother understood the futility of the question—the reality that she wouldn’t be able to do anything if Agnes’s answer was no. 

“Elliot’s OK,” Agnes finally said.

Her mother sounded skeptical and relieved at once. “Oh, that’s good.” 

“Hey, Mom?” Agnes asked.

“Yeah, honey?” 

“Just don’t get sick.”

“Don’t worry. Your father and I are staying inside. You know we have enough canned potatoes and frozen steaks to last the year, practically.” 

Agnes ended the call. 

Elliot wandered up on his little legs, one huge plastic block in his hand. “Mama,” he said, knocking the block against her knee. He had four teeth in his upper gums, two on the bottom— they’d come in right on time, exactly when the child development books and websites said they should. 

Agnes reached out and cupped his face. He didn’t look like Robert, or herself. Or anyone else she knew. He just looked like a baby. She tried to picture the chromosomes that had doubled and crossed, migrated and parted—the processes of meiosis, division, and differentiation that had made him, across months, inside her. But no emotion stirred in her chest at the sight of him. She didn’t know if she wished he would look like Robert or if she wished he wouldn’t.

“If he were a wolf, he’d be an adult within three years,” Robert had said, teasingly. He was lying on his side in bed with his hand under her shirt, on her stomach.

“How creepy,” she said. “Imagine that—if that’s how fast he grew. Or if he were fully grown, but he still acted like a baby.” Robert was laughing. “Or even worse, if he still looked like a baby, but on the inside, he was fully grown.”

“Yeah, I think the wolves can keep their three years,” Robert said. “I’d like more time than that.”

He rolled over on his back. The light from the bedside lamp reflected in his eyes. “You know, they say that humans grow up so slowly because our brains consume so much energy relative to our other organs.”

“Is that why?” Agnes asked. She imagined the years ahead—long, sleepless nights, tantrums, potty training, grade-school bullies, puberty, some long and awkward conversation partly about sex, but mostly about love—all the big and small disappointments she would try to avert or make better. “Energy” sounded like a strange way to put it. She felt that the real reason humans grow up slowly is that they have so much to learn.

“Well, it’s a theory,” Robert had said.

But what did she know, Agnes thought. When a sperm cell meets an egg cell, that’s life. When when a hand warms the small of a back, gently, in the corner of the university library, and oxytocin excites a neurotransmitter in the brain, that’s love.

When the lungs, inflamed and bruised, fill with fluid, and the heart, overcome, stops beating, and the neurotransmitters in the brain, stripped of oxygen, can no longer make the ATP necessary to perform work—when the cells that contain his dreams and memories become inert and begin to decompose—that’s death. 

That’s what Robert would say.

She’d have to scatter his ashes in Yellowstone. On the phone, before anyone really believed the numbers, and before he stopped being able to speak, they had only ever talked about how good it would be when he came home. But that’s what he would want, Agnes knew. He would like to be a tree, but it wouldn’t work to plant one. He had told her about that once, how that messes with their root system and—if allowed too much light too soon, or planted too far from other trees—shortens their lifespan. It depended on the species, he had said, but nature knows what’s best for it far better than we ever could. A tree has to land on the earth as a seed, sprout, wait, out-compete, and grew of its own accord. It has to be connected at the roots to its mother, who, recognizing the chemical signature of her genetic kin, feeds it sugar and phosphorus just as a human mother gives her milk to a child.

The tree, while still a sapling, may very well be grazed by elk and smothered. In that case, it dies, returns to the earth, and ceases to be a tree. He wouldn’t mind being that tree, he said. It was the nature of things.

After she put Elliot to bed, she took a blanket and wrapped it around herself on the couch. She couldn’t sleep in her own bed anymore, the bed that also used to be Robert’s. The branches outside, shaking in the wind, left moonlit shadows on the wall.

***

Months passed. The leaves on the trees turned brilliant yellow and brown and red, and they fell. The virus did its work—what it was programmed to do to ensure the proliferation of its own mindless half-life: it invaded cells, reproduced, burst forth inside bodies, was exhaled, and remained intact in microscopic particles in the air. Its logic could be deduced with numbers and graphs, which appeared like prophecies on the evening news. The population of humans on this earth fell by 15 million. The neon glow from the TV, the melodic voices, saturated the living room as she watched it, daily, with dead eyes. 

In the absence of a vaccine, the non-essential travel ban remained. Her mother didn’t die, but she never came, either.

The groceries continued to be delivered as Agnes ordered them. At least life insurance was still worth something. People needed to eat, and some poor souls still needed money to be able to eat. These people—always a different person each time—rang the bell and left the bags by the door. Of course, with many supply chains disrupted, it was mainly packaged, powdered, and canned goods now.

“The invisible hand of the market, my ass,” Robert had said, taking his shirt off in front of the bedroom mirror. “People have a lot of gall to be using that phrase, like that’s healthy for a society. Sure, an economy is a self-regulated system, but it doesn’t operate by the same rules as nature.” She touched his neck and looked at herself in the mirror behind him, wondering if he still found her just as pretty ten pounds later. “The time-scale is off—no economic system has the chance to evolve over millions and millions of years. People’s needs and desires aren’t the same as an enduring genetic code. Everything’s about individual short-term gain. No one is invested in what a whole society needs to endure.”

Agnes opened the refrigerator. Elliot said, “Go-gur, go-gur!” 

“Humans as a species are too young to understand. In nature, the individual’s behavior doesn’t merely serve the imperative to reproduce. An evolutionary actor that is too self-interested will destroy its environment and thus destroy itself,” he said, articulating the thought with fervor, as if he were at a lectern, speaking to a class. 

“That is, the whole species will die out over time,” Agnes offered in a slow voice, pressing up against him.

“Yes, that’s right.” He combed his hair. She stroked his sides. “When altruistic actors contribute to the long-term health of the ecosystem, they indirectly contribute to the success of their own genetic material. The process of evolution demands it.”

She kissed him behind his ear. 

“So we can say that in nature,” he said, finally turning, “the individual’s imperative to pass on their genes really ends in the benefit of the entire ecosystem.”

Agnes opened the cup of yogurt. She spooned it into Elliot’s mouth thinking the same thing she had thought then, about how long a time he had meant, how incredibly long a time. Now there were countless millions fewer people in the world, and he was one of them. He had believed in the sanctity of knowledge. That his work benefited all humanity. In the end, he left them behind and died for science. Left her, and his child. 

“Maybe you could say humans are also pack animals,” Robert had said, jokingly. A different memory now, in a park, where Elliot was bundled up in Robert’s arms. The flowers were sprouting. It was early spring. He wore his hat with the Yellowstone Forever logo.  

“How’s that?” Agnes said, even though she knew where he was going. Elliot shouted, “Go-gur!” She spooned him some yogurt again.

“Pack, tribe, same thing.” Robert bounced Elliot in his lap. In the kitchen, Elliot, sticky-lipped, bounced in his seat and waved his arms. “That’s how humans evolved, at any rate.”

“You’re half-wolf yourself, I’d say.”

“But doesn’t it make sense? Humans are meant to stick together. Hunt together. Eat together. Stay close to one another. Isn’t that right?” He lifted Elliot up toward the sun and brought him back down to kiss his nose.

“Go-gur!”

But then they’d moved, because he got the job, and the job was better. She guessed he had meant the three of them, together, were enough—or four, or five, because other babies, too, were supposed to come. 

The memory of him had shrunk down to a handful of images that recurred in her mind over and over. That mechanism, too, had a shape. One that could be represented on two axes. It was a circle.

***

When the wolves went extinct, the elk ate the trees, and the trees died. The beavers died. The songbirds went away. 

“Mama!”

When the wolves returned and ate the elk, the trees came back. The beavers came back, and the songbirds. The landscape was beautiful again. That’s the story of Yellowstone.

“Mama!”

New trees, at any rate. Different beavers and songbirds.

“Hun-gee, Mama!”

The elk were a virus, weren’t they? They proliferated. They devoured. They did not know how to maintain balance. They scorned it, they took and they took. Undoubtedly they would have destroyed themselves eventually.

But human beings do not have that kind of time.

Agnes looked up suddenly. The noise had stopped—the room was silent. When she looked, she saw Elliot under the kitchen table, crouching to pick a forgotten, whole grape off the ground. When she got to him, that quick, it had already disappeared inside his mouth. 

She grabbed him and hooked her fingers past his gums. 

He swallowed.

His body heaved once, like a half-cough, producing only a wet, impacted sound. While he wriggled and his face turned red, Agnes began slapping his back, hard. What was it they had shown her at the maternity class? She remembered the still, lifeless face of the doll, and felt abject terror again. 

He was wheezing now. The high-pitched noises were razor-sharp in her ears. She pushed him face down on her other hand and tried to give solid, open palmed strikes to his torso. But he was twisting too much. 

She flipped him to put his back on the ground. She held one of his arms while she jabbed two fingers up and in beneath his solar plexus. But now she was crying, and he was squirming less and less. His face was a brilliant purple-red, and his eyes, impossibly wide, darted back and forth in panic.

“Jesus Christ,” Agnes said. She scooped his whole body into her arms.

There weren’t many leaves left on the trees, and when Agnes threw open the door to the house, the wind, bitingly cold on her cheeks, almost knocked her down at once. She didn’t know what she was doing. She was running out over the lawn, into the street. She was crying and screaming something, but she couldn’t hear herself over the ringing in her ears.  

Then someone was wrenching Elliot from her, kneeling, and wrapping a fist and open palm around him, pressing his back to her stomach.

***

The woman jerked twice, two calm and clean motions. 

The grape popped out onto the black pavement. Elliot coughed a few times, and then he started wailing. He stumbled into her arms. Agnes held him and sat down like that in the middle of the street, astounded.

“How long had he been choking?” The woman was wearing a hoodie, yoga pants, sneakers, and a hand-sewn cloth mask over her mouth and nose. Her voice was muffled by the cloth. There were brown-pink bruises on her forehead and on her cheeks around her eyes, the kind nurses had from working endless hours in goggles.

“I don’t know,” Agnes said, looking up. “I think one or two minutes.” 

“That’s good—that’s not too long.” The woman had been looking out over her, to the row of houses, but then she looked down at the two of them. She raised her eyebrows for a second, as if in surprise, but then her face relaxed again. “He should be OK. No need to go to the hospital. Not that they would be able to do much anyway.”

“What?” Agnes said.

“Sorry?”

“Your face—something.”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s just… I think I know you, that’s all.” The woman stepped away and sat down, leaving a dozen feet between them. Agnes finally reminded herself that now, having been so close to the woman, they could get sick. She was a nurse. Elliot could die. But without her, he would surely have died. Agnes would think about all that later. 

Where had she seen this woman before—the grocery store, once, months ago? Or the mall? Elliot began to calm down, but he kept his little arms tight around her neck, breathing hard after his long cry. 

“Your husband passed away in the hospital up the street, yes?” the woman said. “One of the first. The wolf guy. He told me about it.”

Agnes felt a ball form in the pit of her stomach.

“I was the one on the video call,” the woman said. “The nurse.”

“Oh.” 

Agnes pulled up the memory of her jealousy and hatred. She could see the shape of it, what it had looked like, but the emotion was gone. A long moment passed. The woman looked up to the sky. Agnes bounced Elliot in her lap. 

“I’m sorry,” the nurse said. She started wiping her eyes with one sleeve, then the other. She sighed. “Sorry—I know that doesn’t do anything for you. It wasn’t fair. And I—”

“No, don’t be sorry,” Agnes said, looking at her. “It’s not your fault.” 

“It’s still messed up.” The nurse had smooth skin and pretty eyes. She must be young. Her voice was young.

“How can you possibly remember me from something like that?”

“You remember everyone you take care of who dies. And who they were talking to. The faces. Children, parents. It never gets any easier that way.” 

Agnes frowned.

“If he could talk to me now,” Agnes said, slowly, because her voice was wavering, “he would say how he died was entirely fair. Even though it was sad for... him and me. He would say he couldn’t compete. Isn’t that ridiculous? But he really would say that. That he died to contribute to the long-term success of the human race.”

The nurse thought about that. 

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “He seemed like the kind of guy we could have used in the world a while longer.” 

On Agnes’s mind, in that second, were matters of science and nature, reproduction, life and death—all that was bigger than her and contained her in it, and that operated with its own ruthless, inevitable logic—all she understood, and all she didn’t. She was just one person, one life. Him and her, her and him.

Elliot rested his head against her shoulder. Agnes reached up and smoothed down his hair. It felt so like Robert’s beneath her hands.

about the writer

Julia M. Walton is a senior at Princeton University, where she is concentrating in English and pursuing certificates in Creative Writing, Humanistic Studies, and East Asian Studies. She has been recognized for her short fiction by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and has been awarded the Emily Ebert Junior Prize and the Francis Biddle Sophomore Prize by Princeton's English Department. Her creative and critical work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Foundationalist, The Paper Shell Review, Tortoise: A Journal of Writing Pedagogy, The Nassau Literary Review, Questions: Philosophy for Young People, and The Best Teen Writing of 2016. She is also an alumna of the New England Young Writers’ Conference at Middlebury's Breadloaf Campus and Susquehanna University's Advanced Writers Program. Currently, she serves as Editor-in-Chief Emerita of The Nassau Literary Review and is working on her first novella. When at home in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, she enjoys buying hats for her pets, who do not share her enthusiasm.