RAYA BANKS

I swallowed a reflexive gulp, feeling my heartbeat skyrocket in my chest as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, trying to make out exactly what it was I had been looking at hunched over my bed.

I watched the man watch me back in the inky darkness of the room, my fingers numb as I dug my nails into the beds. I had thought previously, that I had somehow conjured my mother into existence, but I was almost certain now that I was watching a man. The lines of his hunched shoulders were too broad to be a woman’s, much less my frail old mother, and the...