I recognized the author right away, but the first words of the story startled me:
We had agreed — the woman I loved and I — that as soon as the child was born, we would perform an act of mercy and decency and wrap it in a towel to drown it in a nearby sink of water; like a kitten in a sack dropped into a river. But in the motel room that was our home, the woman I loved died while giving birth, and her child, a grotesque tiny bundle of strangely silent vulnerability, was all that remained to remind me of her. I was nearly blind with tears in that lonely motel room at the side of a highway. With the selfishness typical of my entire life to that point, I delayed the mercy and decency we had promised the baby. I used the towel not to wrap and drown the little girl, but to clean her dry of blood and placenta. In the moment as I lifted her twisted, misshapen arms and gently wiped the terrible hunch in the center of her back, where her arms connected to a ridge of bone that pushed against her translucent skin, I heard God speak to me for the first time in my life . . .
If you've read Broken Angel, you'll easily recognize this as an earlier version of the same story, but no less poignant. Do yourself a favor and click over and read it.
One final thought: My current WIP started as a short story. Michael Snyder's book started as a short story. Do you know of any others? Yours, perhaps?
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