&(one-hundred and four)
This will be the story of loss and losing, failure and stretching arms when they reach out to hug and fall on the dust of saw blades and planks, boards and nails. Trees. This will be the story of fallen trees. And this will be the story of how a boy when he is born has a mother and then doesn’t, later, his mother missing, and how he tries to make a mother out of angles and lines, planks boards and nails, the limbs of forests. And this too will be the story of his limbs, his greying arms and their reach for a father who is without the shape of his name, a mother gone, a sister in bed at night and him, this boy, watching from the doorway of her room, his arms outstretched, his mind numbing, pinned. The sounds of night birds at the window, the summer, the green of leaves. This will be the story of that, how this boy exists and then doesn’t, how he dies, coughing, down in bed and reaching into himself, his heart taken out, placed in a chest, a box, a cedar womb to hold the sounds he never makes. He breathes in out, then no more in. Struggle and loss, the without, the lack. This will be the story of that, of him, this boy turned failure, the limited reach of his arms, the limbs of trees, the fallen fell trees, hollowing on forest floor, underneath moss and coverage, the decay and the going gone. This boy, this dying man, that story. This will be that story, the story of that, this story.