natural
14: funeral
They said shadows climbed out of the coffin at funerals. His grandmother climbed out of hers: on that bright day where every shadow was in stark contrast with the light, where they curled around his feet as he stood behind his mother, around his hands as he helped pick out the bones. They steadied him then, but afterwards, in the silence before sleep, they clung to him like cobwebs and he couldn't brush them off. They stayed and dug her last words into his skin until he was near-obsessed, because there were no new words to erase or colour them.