Thirteen
The trees wrote their last scarlet notes. Silence grew inside me. All winter my voice felt like a bowl of very still water; for hours at a time nothing moved it. Here is the house: a table beneath a golden light, Mother’s closed bedroom door, a window. Here is the garden. She wanted to move away from us, I knew, and I’d have let her. Go, I whispered, but alone, while watching a sparrow splash in a basin of emerald water, spindly leaves, feathers.