Invitation

The baby shower invitation is still waiting on the black granite counter when we return home almost a week after the mandatory evacuation order roared on our phones. Our electricity, water, and gas have been restored, though it will be another two weeks before the fires will be contained at any percentage worth reporting.  

I had left the mail next to the coffee pot when we fled in the early dark. We had each other, our passports, the dog. In that moment, it was clear what mattered most. 

Now we’ve returned home. 

We have a home to return to. It is no small miracle, like an infant after a miscarriage. Breathtaking and heartbreaking, this tender new life. 

I pick up the cool card stock adorned in pink pansies, yellow daffodils, cream butterflies, and pale green vines, the tenacious and tenuous stirrings. The RSVP card is clipped to the invitation with a heart-shaped, copper-colored paper clip, and as I rub my thumb over the paper clip, it feels smooth and cold, but I keep imagining it hot, searing my fingerprint ridges flat. I can almost smell the stinging sulfur. At what temperature, I wonder, does skin burn? Or a tree combust? Or metal melt? 

I imagine eventualities a prenatal ultrasound doesn’t show: accident, addiction, asthma. Stop, I think, but the fear blazes on: bacteria, celiac ...   

“Just stop,” I say aloud as I reach into the cabinet for a ceramic coffee mug. 

The sky is blue today, and I am going to say yes. 

Charlotte Maya is the author of Sushi Tuesdays: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Resilience (2023, Post Hill Press). Her essays have been published in The New York Times (Modern Love and Tiny Love Stories), Hippocampus Magazine, Brevity Blog, Writer’s Digest, and elsewhere, and her work has been featured on CNN and the BBC, as well as NPR’s AirTalk with Larry Mantle. She lives in Southern California. More at charlotte-maya.com and @charlottemayawriter.

This essay is a Short Reads original.