Hannah Withers
Hannah Withers is a writer, audio producer, and improviser living in Chicago, IL. Her work can be found in various outlets such as The Kenyon Review, The Red Branch Journal, McSweeney's, and NPR. She writes at home, she tweets @HBWithers.
Too Big
How would you explain it? Tucking her in at night, checking under the bed for monsters, explaining that lives end, that sometimes the borders we build are breached by things we can’t control. Tell her not to be scared? I said the man they’d found was old, though I didn’t know if he was. I told her that he was homeless, which I also didn’t know. I had to construct some difference, some border between him and us. The truth is too big: some day I will die, and Abbie’s world will expand past whatever limits I protect her with.
6/24/2013