Under this soft and silver night a mother’s tears fall as a bow upon a violin. Dark shadows dance a silent waltz across the walls, fluttering like gray moths and whispering feverish secrets to a sleeping child. He does not stir, nor does he cast a glance towards the anguished features of the woman in whose arms he limply rests. His mother has laid her blue veil across his body and pulls him firmly to her chest. Littered across the concrete floor are drifting constellations of clear glass, ebbing and flowing in splintered patterns that reverently reflect the child’s ethereal face. He and the woman are alike in their stillness. She is listening for a breath stolen from the hand of God, sitting clothed in regality and watching her son’s red gaze drip down her face, raking her worn skin in cutting strokes. His cheeks are sunken against gleaming bones and painted with ash, torn flesh tightly draped across a frozen rib cage.

Moonlight strikes the woman’s face as she sings to her son. Her voice spills through the cool air like buttermilk and white roses. She sings words crumbling and weary, words with rusted syllables and gold-gilded edges, black silk words veneered with gossamer tears and ringing with broken copper bells. She sings as she rises to leave from the center of her concrete room, delicately stepping on shattered glass and past dancing shadows, scarlet ink spilling from the soles of her feet and the burning wound in her chest. Her heart, though pierced by a sword, swells and quickens in the night, a modest percussion beneath the grand and sweeping crescendo of her mourning song. Before her sits a green mountain cloaked in the rising sun, its summit disappearing into a faint crown of stars. Wisps of grass melt into dark gravel beneath her and blanket the ground like snow. As a cross set upon her by heaven, her child lies heavy in her grasp, resplendent colors darting about his soft and lovely expression under the open sky. She lays him gently in the dirt as night is swept from the earth. Amidst dark soil and thorns, she kisses his forehead adoringly. The ground becomes still beneath them, exhaling a weary and final breath into the new morning. Alone, a mother lifts her mantle to cover her son’s face, and the air tastes of salt and light.