Warmth somehow remains with me, feeding my body. Perhaps I was so starved from someplace deep within where all the dissapointments and pain grew to tangle around my soul.

Clear, gentle tears are the fuel behind the heat. Dead even as they rise to the surface, they still lend some undeserved relief to my frigid being.

I am drowning in my own weakness, if nothing else. My wish may yet be granted and even now my insolent eyelids trickle out tears. Groping out with my hand from my strengthening shell for perhaps the last time, I fumble around for something to satisfy the part of me that refuses to die. Only cool stone and colder blood is found, and my childish fear intensifies.

"You may bring one thing with you..."

To heaven? Or to my uncle's house?

I think I might have chosen the bike, at one point, just to prove I could get to heaven with it. That I didn't steal it. Riding the bike to my uncle's house had been unsucessful.

My mind is going.

Wandering.

Traveling.

Spinning.

Collapsing.

Along with my body, it is drained of substance and must shut down without nourishment. I...

What am I going to bring with me? I want to bring something for him that was beautiful. Separate him from everyone else by showing him the bitter joy of a physical existance that none of the others had experienced.

Something is pressing up against my hand. In the darkness of the corner, already hazed over by the shadow of death, I can not see it from here...

Carefully, I lift my potential object into what remains of light...

Snowy, lily-white, and utterly beautiful, some lost feather was deposited in this chamber in which I dwell. Somehow, it has remained unstained by the pooling blood, and it feels soft against my trembling fingertips. Probably some lost little girl is pouting over the loss of such a lovely specimen. But it is mine, now.

Selfish. So human. Such is the nature of possesions.