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❝ Spend my evenings down the riverside, my favorite place when you're not here. Awaiting dusk to throw a tinted smile, for every nightfall brings you near. ❞
When You're Not Here, No Clear Mind
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THE OAK FOUGHT THE WIND AND WAS BROKEN. THE WILLOW BENT WHEN IT MUST AND SURVIVED. Ronald had been gone for weeks of two. His gracile legs no longer dragged a pouting, cherub face. He was not huddled in corners, dutiful to whichever task befallen. The lopsided grin that met his sister's playful scoldings, her jabbing finger against his forehead, and the sharp rebukes over his cancer sticks were long past.
Those cigarettes, their pack furrowed amid her trembling clutch and paper stained in dried blood, were the only reminder left of him.
The rest of her brother's fifteen fleeting years, now a memory...
"Stupid boy," she had wept, cradling his torn body. His guts had spilled a grotesque tangle upon the forest bed. His limbs had hung lifeless from her embrace, no longer reaching, no longer holding. She had kissed his ashen cheeks, her lips bruising his cold flesh. Her thumbs had pressed to his leaden eyes, quivering. "Stupid, stupid..."
She had wanted to grant him rest. He slept, she dared believe, in a place far gentler than the decay ensnaring them. A futile prayer had slopped from her trembling lips, its cadence erratic and laced with anguish―a fevered litany to a God she had clung to in a life strewn with grief and hollowed by absence. But God had long abandoned the world.
"He's gone, Landen, that fool of a boy... Used to be chasin' fireflies in Ma's garden. Look at 'im now, layin' under this mound of unfeelin' dirt. Oh Lord, how'm I s'posed to carry on without my baby?"
Harleigh sat before the grave, her silhouette etched against the forest's verdant shade. The soil, black and clinging, sheathed the last vestiges of her Ronnie. Shane had carved his name into a crude wooden plank, the letters jagged but intent. Barely legible, such was yet better than letting dust and grime engulf his memory like a million others, in defiance against the erasure of time: Ronald Wade Walker.
