My Mother is a Fish

It was the thing that had plagued their nightmares for weeks. No, it must have been years. It just became more pronounced, more urgent in the past fortnight. It had loomed more ominously on the horizon than before, until it had blotted the horizon out, and now everything was darkness.

The lopsided tower they all called home was illuminated with a sickening green glow, as if the light had simply bled into the air after those two words were muttered, slowly winding up into night sky until a garish glowing tattoo formed upon the cloudy canvas. The empty air still seemed to echo with screams of loss. The odor of burnt dinner lingered, the only remains of the river of smoke that had been pouring out of the oven when nobody was left to attend to the cooking.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.

Scattered across the lawn were redheads, popping onto the emerald earth from anywhere; from nowhere. Confusion and despair saturated the air and precipitated into the poor family's own empty bodies; vessels of pain. Everything seemed stagnant. Lost. The ultimatum had been met.

Molly Weasley was dead.

It's hard to describe loss. It doesn't translate into words of any language; colors only breach the shallowest level of it; song can only allude to that enveloping sting. It's something that must be felt. It's in the pit of your stomach, the catch in your throat, the ache in your bones, or the hollowness in your eyes. Emptiness, or the knowledge thereof. The realization that you'll never be quite full. The utter solitude, lost in a sea of other lonelinesses.

A girl wandered into the house, freezing at the doorway for a moment, but drifting in eventually as though a gust of wind had pushed her. An aging man fell against the wall, near the garden, where the vegetables were waiting to be picked. Boys stood still, ginger polka dots on the grass, blank. Two strangers lingered nearby, hurt, crying, but tied to her only by a cord of trust and devotion, not by the life-deep blood running in the veins of the brokenhearted kin.

Guilt? Yes, guilt was an illness in all of them; it always was, always is. Confused? Of course. The feeling of imploding and exploding

The Lord is close to all who call on him, yes, to all who call on Him sincerely.

What's the afterlife? They hadn't thought about it. The now had always been there, the later too hard to conceptualize. What was she now? Where, why, how.

Nightmare, nightmare, burning bright, in the terrors of the night, to what purpose did she serve? They don't understand why.

"Gone gone gone goddamn."

What else was there to say? Nothing to do. What of the glue to bind the family? Sweaters and fudge and pies and hugs can die too. The air smelled bittersweet, tears and sweat and burnt and living and death, trees and leaves and grass and clouds. Was is are.

"So afraid in my heart; we're bound to be afraid."