Sandra Sidi, Second Place winner in Narrative’s 2021 Spring Story Contest, holds an MA in political science from Yale and an MFA from Texas State University. She was an analyst with the US military in Baghdad and is a guest instructor at Marine Corps University, where she lectures on female integration in combat, sexual assault prevention, and US foreign policy in Iraq. She teaches writing at Texas State University.

Photograph by Audrey Kate.

The Bridge

An Essay

by Sandra Sidi

In late September my ex-husband called to tell me that our boys were sent home with a note: there had been several reported cases of lice in the boys’ school. In the weeks since Texas day cares and schools started operating, we’d spent every afternoon sanitizing the boys from head to toe for COVID-19, neglecting to consider a very different invader.

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