Tera hung
Christmas lights in the windows of her room.
Tiny white lights, in strings, like
icicles. They glowed soft
yellow from behind the pull-down shades and cast the room in the faint warm gold of their burning incandescence all the
night.
I looked in on her at some point, walking the
hallway without reason some hours after she’d gone to sleep. Her
daughter, sick with a cough and
fever, had climbed into Tera’s room, and lay, a tiny mass at rest by her side. I watched
their faces in parallel, cast in gold, twin faces except for
the gap of years and worries. I thought she was an
angel, that little girl, features so small you didn’t want to touch them, afraid that they might break.
Asleep.
She came to me the next
morning, and told me how the sun shone all night in her
mother’s room, “all night long!”
I’d long stopped trying to set this little one straight by that point.
It’s too beautiful to watch her believe.