Patrice stuffed her socks next to Terry’s T-shirts and shut the dresser drawer.  Unpacked. Almost. At the bottom of the suitcase was her passport. She opened the blue cover, her face hopeful on that first page. The other pages were blank. Going nowhere, she thought. Again.

Helen Raica-Klotz is a writer/teacher in northern Michigan. Her fiction collection, Superior Stories, was the winner of the 2025 Michigan Writers Chapbook Contest, and two of her nonfiction essays were nominated for the 2026 Pushcart Prize. Learn more at raica-klotz.com.