The grass he stood on was green and wet with dew. The sky he watched was light and stained with pink. His mother’s arm around him was bare and dark. Her frizzy hair was loose, and out of its usual bun.
“Shhh” she had whispered when she shook him in his bed. “I want you to see this” she said as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He had fumbled in the dark to slide his socks over his feet, each toe seemed to find its own thread to stick in. Then with numb fingers he threaded the laces of his shoes through each other until they formed themselves into neat bows. Lastly he slid on an old leather jacket that had once belonged to his father, before stepping onto the porch. His mother was already there waiting for him, for a moment they stood there together, breathing in the crisp cool air. Then, without breaking the silence that the dawn so carefully held, she turned, with her son following behind, and walked down to the dock.
He paused for a second and watched her standing there, her thin, graceful form silhouetted by the rising sun. His chest expanded until he was sure it would break, he held the breath in and slowly released it in a steady stream. A smile spread across his face, and he was sure that this was what happiness was.
They sat there together, the son and the mother, the mother and the son, till long after the sun fully risen.
He looked up into his mother’s face and knew she must be dreaming, for that was the only time her face lit up like that. The tension that usually held her face so taut was gone, and her eyes gazed longingly out across the water.
In the full glow of the morning sun, her arm pulling her son against her, she felt as though she were dreaming. It had been three years since the accident, three years she had only kept going for his sake. But maybe she was coming back again, or maybe, maybe she was really just dreaming.
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The grass he stood on was green. The sky he stood under was grey. The people who surrounded him wore black. And the stone he stared at was white and marbled.
He had been thinking, dreaming, of that morning on the dock all those years ago. At first he had tried to focus on what the pastor was saying, but each word that fell from his pouting lips felt so weak and pathetic in comparison to the woman they described.
His mother was not a “good soul” she was so much more than that. There were no words to describe the way her teeth flashed through her dark lips, or the shine in her eyes when she teased him. “A devout woman” was no way to describe the sincere prayers he sometimes heard her whisper in the night, and the tears that came with them. “A loving wife” didn’t even begin to sum up her feelings for his father, or the way she missed him everyday after the accident. But the biggest injustice the pastor had done her was the description of “a kind mother”. Could the radiant sun, who the planets orbit, and who lights up the world be described as kind?
He reached an arm out blindly, and feeling it rest upon a small shoulder pulled it close, until his daughter was pressed up against him. He rubbed his hand up and down her arm as though comforting her, even though he knew she was still too little to understand what had happened. To understand that, now, she would never know her grandmother. To know that, just like that, there was one less person in the world. One less ray of sun lighting up the day.
The pastor ceased his dialogue and the people began to leave. He took a rose from his jacket and handed it to his daughter to place on the turned earth.
A hand touched his arm, and his wife pulled him into an embrace. Her dark frizzy hair was pulled up into a tight bun, the way his mother had always worn it, and for an instant he thought he saw his mother beside him, but he was only dreaming.
this is really beautiful :( i was shocked at the outcome