Fifteen thousand and twelve things could happen between our car and his classroom.

I tell myself they won’t; I tell myself he’ll be fine. He doesn’t need me to walk him anymore. And I don’t.

But he’s my little boy, and it’s so very, very hard to let him go.

M. Elaine Moore is a North Carolina fiction writer and poet. Her work can be found in print in The Island Breeze, and Outer Banks publication, and online at Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Four and Twenty, The Camel Saloon, Apollo’s Lyre, Pond Ripples, Three Line Poetry, and the Journal of Microliterature.