The Unborn Child

Blank screen, blank page, blank verse. You shut your notebook with a contented sigh.  You pull at your hair sometimes, in the hope that it will grow longer, but mother says it never will. You write for her, sometimes, for mum. You always showed her your writing, even as a child. She’s beautiful, you’ve heard everyone say, and you agree completely. You wrote about it, long ago. You wrote about it recently, too. She looked so pretty from where you were sitting, at her feet, in the grass. The sky was so blue. Like a thousand diamonds sparkling in the sun. It made you think of a song.

You write about music sometimes. You tried to play the flute once, but when you blew into it, it caught fire. You dropped it; the flames had nearly singed your hair. You had been shocked, nearly bursting into tears. Later, when you calmed down, you watched the fire sing. The flute had never sounded better. You remember the strains fading into the night. It makes you mellow even now. Mother said you had found a new way of making music, you had clapped your hands in excitement.

Blank verse always captivated you. Blank pages made you want to write, and blank screens made you want to break them with the neat swipe of a baseball bat. No one likes a mess, you have been taught, and neither do you. You clean up the pieces when the screen shatters. Each piece is very beautiful. They reflect your eyes. They reflect the sky behind your eyes, and the trees.

Its the season for the trees to shed their leaves now, and each purple layer of skin falls onto your head, into your palms, onto the ground. It doesn’t rain, it only ever sheds leaves here, the seasons work like that, mother had said. You wrote about that. About leaf shedding.

It was shedding leaves when the sky cracked open, and you are just shutting your notebook. The last thing you see is the sky crack open.