Spirit Babies

Years after choosing not to become parents, five men and women are visited — in memory, in dream, in quiet moments they can’t explain — by the children they never had.

A deacon who has kept one door of himself closed for twenty-eight years hears a child’s laughter coming from an empty room. A labor and delivery nurse who has caught over a thousand babies for other families finally sits down with the one she didn’t. Two divorced parents, estranged for over two decades, discover at their daughter’s wedding that they’ve spent all those years remembering the same afternoon two completely different ways. A man who can no longer have children is forced to reckon with the ones he once assumed he’d always have time for. And a church elder, retiring after forty years of preaching grace to frightened young women, finds that even a peace she made with God decades ago still has one more thing to say to her.

Spirit Babies is a five-story anthology about the choices we make when we’re too young to understand what they’ll cost us, and the reckonings that arrive — gently, patiently, without judgment — when we’re finally old enough to sit still for them. Written with tenderness rather than shame, it gives shape and dignity to a grief that millions of men and women carry quietly, and rarely get permission to speak about out loud.

Tags: spirit babies, short stories, anthology, grief, faith, African American fiction, literary fiction, healing