raincloudsplay

Now, my beloved, let us weave our mourning song together: rallying the quiet chords and dimming the major melodies-- we are minor in our elegy. Let us stroke this song out lovingly and softly send the air reverberating to your siblings: now dumbfounded, silent, still. They stand in muted atrophy, sheathed, like we, in blackened grief. No harmony hums forth from behind broken teeth. And as they cannot speak, we, beloved, you and I, together will be their voice.

*** Three weeks later. I'm used to the house: to the smell coming from the kitchen every morning as Jenny cooks breakfast, to the warm feel of the steam as it envelopes me in the shower, to the quiet conversations Myron and I have in the library every night when he's not working. I am not really limited. I'm allowed to explore the house when Jenny goes out to shop for food, I'm allowed to read any book in the library (I have found that I can indeed read, and do so vigorously when Myron is busy). But there are a few things I am not allowed to do, and I do not know why. Myron does not allow me to leave the house. Not even for a moment. So the

in winter days, mother wakes heavy-lidded as her skeleton recollects itself and stumbles in a half-thought arrangement of curious limbs, trying to teach the ribcage how to sew back together its columns of rough-hewn teeth so her swelling light does not spill through open slits, a heart anchored firmly in her chest and pushing fire through tangled veins. tender bones shake off lakes of snow from where they drifted into the craters that hide behind her knees while the thickened night presses forests of gentle bruises into an aching spine and counts all the ways dead trees could blossom. white-winged larks are the first to flock to