The Intercessor: A Name Said at the Kitchen Sink The Reed & The Flame, #2

Note to Readers: This standalone short story is also included in the complete edition, The Reed & The Flame: A Collection of Short Stories of Faith and Endurance. If you already own the complete collection, you already have this story! Looking for the full journey? You can enjoy this story on its own or get all ten stories together in the collected volume.

For fifty years she has said his name every morning at the kitchen sink.

Raymond Dell robbed a filling station, shot the boy behind the counter, and ran. The crash he caused as he fled killed her husband and left her son unable to dress himself — but that was only ever incidental, the law's word for it: no charge, no name on any docket for what it did to her family. Raymond went to prison for the clerk. She got a folded flag and fifty years of buttoning a grown man's shirt.

And every morning, at the sink, she has prayed for Raymond by name. Not because she has forgiven him the way people mean the word — she has not forgotten a single thing — but because the praying is the only place she has found to put it that isn't her son.

Now word comes that Raymond is dying in the prison infirmary. There is a form, and a chair, and forty miles between them, if she wants them.

The second story of The Reed & The Flame, a new collection from the author of The Candle, The Intercessor is a hard, unsentimental piece about forgiveness practiced as an act long before it is ever a feeling — and whether a discipline kept for fifty years needs the other person at all.