Strive OP News

The cereal aisle at the Kroger on 14 Mile is where it usually happens. A cart rolls past, slows, then stops. Eyes drop to the baby strapped in the seat — to the small, molded shell wrapped snug around the head, decorated maybe with stickers, maybe a tiny painted galaxy. And then the look. You know the look. The one that’s half curiosity, half pity, and entirely unwelcome.

The first time Jenna noticed it, she wasn’t looking for anything. She was just rinsing shampoo off the back of her daughter’s head in the kitchen sink, the way she had a hundred times before, and her palm caught a flatness she couldn’t un-feel. Not a bump. The opposite of a bump. A place where the round should have been and wasn’t.

She was a Sterling Heights...

The first thing Sarah Moore noticed was the pillow.

Not the head. The pillow.

Her son Conner was four months old, and the soft cotton crib pillow she’d been told never to use — the one she didn’t use — somehow seemed to have left an impression anyway. The back of his head, just behind the right ear, had gone flat. Not subtly flat. Flat like...