Lily of the Valley

CHAPTER TWO : HOPE IS LOST

Clouds were just fluffy and white, right? How could they make dark colours to represent the girl's dark hair, or arrange themselves in such ways that the female could seem to have 'shorter' hair than the other one mentioned just before?

Their genesis could never be understood by Caelus, who didn't even know what he was talking about when he was just a child, when he made them up as he went along.

According to his mother, Caelus went along and made up the most random things. His favourite flower was a lily of the valley, though he'd never seen one.

His mother's eyes were always bright and shiny when she watched the clouds, like she was travelling to another universe that was nothing but hers.

She'd always reach out with the hand that she'd use to hold Caelus' and let their hands, made into a ball of fingers latching onto each other, reach up into the sky and trace some of the clouds in the sky, while Josiah fell asleep on that wooden jetty, ignoring the splinters that poked into his skin and had to be plucked out after he came running back to the beach house crying about how it hurt so much.

And her hands trembled ever-so-slightly, a quake that Caelus looked at and realised, like a tiny earthquake that no one would ever notice, no matter how long it tried to shake the earth with its tremors.

She was smiling towards her son, and Caelus wasn't even looking back at her.

He wondered how she'd feel about that, but he couldn't smile.

Not when he'd seen the sheer difference in her, now. He'd thought just earlier that nothing would ever change, and though he knew he wanted something to change in his life, he didn't want to be his mother.

Couldn't it be his brother?

The beach?

The tides?

The plants?

The world around them that they didn't even interact with.

Even his father?

Even him.

Anything could change, his age, his feelings, his looks, his anything, but just not his mother.

The same person who had carried him for nine months, pushed him out, held him in her arms, walked around with him, showed him the world, taught him all the things that she'd known despite being a frog sitting in a well, and made him a good person.

An actual good person that might just measure up to her.

It took everything that Caelus had not to worry about her and ask what was going on immediately.

That would be prying into someone else's business, and the very same person who he would never want to pry into the business of.