Mother's Foundling

Mother studied the still white figure. A child, no a teenage girl, lay bathed in the hues of night. Mother had not realized that the child was not a child. She wondered what made the child so innocent.
Honey hair spilled around her as she lay peaceful in the cold grass. Shadow things made lines across her pale, soft face. Relaxed as if asleep. But, no, the innocence lay in the whites.
Those orbs were like moons in the vague darkness, white parts glistening hazily. Staring. Her eyes reflected the sky, the mirror earth, the longing flight of ghostly stars. Staring.
One ivory palm faced up, as if in religious meditation. As if by benediction or rapture.Vulnerable to the chastising sky.
Mother thought with approval that perhaps she had given herself over to the clawing tears, sat cross-legged, back arched down with sobs that fell into open palms. Sacrificial pools offered to the stars.
The other hand faced down, claws digging into the earth to feel the pulse that beat there. Talons scratching deep in effort to hold still the spinning of physical time. A visible proof of life’s fated will.
Mother read in that hand, that coalition of muscle and thought, the sound of gasping for breath. Mother loved that hand.
Mother observed the way the child lay, exquisitely perched on the skewer of mortal earth. Body held taught yet quiet on invisible tight rope. Knees bent as if fallen backward from begging or prayer. Though Mother hardly knew the difference.
The tree shadows scraped wickedly at her edges, making them soft and transient. It was in mimicry of her current nature.
Mother knelt to touch the honey hair that spilt all around, combed with evening dew. Her eyes traveled the human length to the child’s feet. One pointed precisely as a ballerina’s. It’s tenseness in contrast to the body’s will.
The other clumsily upturned, almost grotesque.
This child had lived too gently in the in between until the reckoning moment.
And the poor child’s white dress was smeared with dirt and water, touched by earth’s sullying hands. She lay spoiled beneath the pure, pure sky.
Mother stepped away, dusting her hands of the sky’s child. Or what had once been.
And so Mother turned.
Mother did not need another body. She already held too many in her womb.
And so Mother walked.
Leaving the corpse behind.


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