~•~
At her ears were glass bulbs, red like cherries; marble in size. She placed one finger outside, one in front, feeling the loose hair at her neck, her flesh in the cold; feeling the metal at glass backs.
Her memories were of the same color, the same mixed with yellow. Glimpses of her father, his words.
How he'd helped, how he'd cared.
There was so much now. And in the secrets she met, she continued to feel increasingly alone.
How had her mother in death known to whisper...
~•~
The sun touched a curtain, coloring the room in one corner gold, warm red-gold, amid stairs and walls of dark blue, almost black.
Thomas' steps above, in his room. Tinny notes, metal; the sounds of his secret work.
The sound of the snow finding the floor.
With three words, what she wanted could be known, but instead her feet found the paths shown to her by those known before.
Those who knew the stains in her hand, on the white cloth. On the bed.
~•~
In the glow, the lamps' glow, moths gathered; clutched hollow walls in circles. The living muted against green-grays.
Near her hands they moved, they bowed in an oval away from another, and she touched them. Over their wings, their many eyes.
And in the light and in her dreams they flickered, fought.
The dull lights and the memories there. The things she hadn't found, and the keys. The things. And him.
~•~
The bodies hidden. The poison to their wombs. Their bones known and met. Hidden. Their bodies, their hearts known.
The flies imprisoned, unable to move. On the table forever they'd stay.
Dark outlines from the floor below, coming to her from death. Coming to her.
There is no life, no warmth to meet her in the night. No hand. Not his.
The hands and cautions of the dead, the women and their sorrows. Their voices in wax, in cupboards in the wall. In the stones and the clay at her feet.
~•~
And she alone. In the snow alone. The clays, blood red, staining her eyes.
Around her finger she could still feel remnants of him; the thin smokey trial that had left his bleeding wound, that had as ivy wished to bind itself to her.
A coil that she soon after saw in a dream leaving her body between her legs, all that was left of him inside of her had dissipated in a burst of small woven cloud. A cloud of the same whites and earth tones.
There were those left red after death, left black.
He, Thomas, was as the snow; her gown. His eyes yellow, his passing blood a black-brown from wounds of soft copper.
His face had been cold to the touch, cold and foreign. Like the weight of water which with change in movement turns against the heart of hand, causing a warning pain, advising to yield.
But she hadn't.
~•~
One night she saw the others in whole in her dreams. She saw their stark faces in flesh beneath blackened glass. Pale, closed eyes, crossed arms, but no blood or wounds. A death shown in the way they would have preferred, had they been given a choice.
Thomas was privy, was at hand, could not find it in himself to say words of love to them, would in no way devote himself, but had once been a father.
Father to a child that had barely lived.
In a woman's arms, she had seen it in life and death, the same shade as the others, not the black of her own mother.
~•~
And Edith wondered, how would her spirit be wounded. What hue, other than red, might it take.
~•~
