It's Still Life

21 of 27: Mourngale – The Colour of Unbroken Song

Mapping the Riverbed

Winter had settled into the seams of the house that morning—our quarrel lost to the iron’s hiss, as I pressed three shirts, their cotton wrinkling like elephant skin under my restless, riverless hands.

Life was steady, yes — he worked, I worked — but the silence of my body hummed, a costume of inevitability I wore even in sleep; yet I remained stubborn as winter hunger.

I wrote letters across oceans to a Catholic orphanage in Seoul, chasing motherhood like a thirst that had carved its own riverbed deep within me.

The phone rang; I leaned across the ironing board, the cord tangling like a vine around my wrist as a woman’s voice spilled into the room — telling me of two brothers, five and twelve, often overlooked, and with them the first fragile shape of choice, her words hesitant beneath the weight of their ages.

That evening, I stood at the sink, hands buried in soapy water, watching streetlights bleed gold through the windowpane, and I said to him: “Wednesday at ten o’clock, we’ll meet the social worker — and no, we won’t see their pictures; our choice will be for who they are, not what they look like.”

And somewhere in the layers of our silence, Felreil whispered: “Every grief that finds a voice becomes a bird — this one did not fall — it flew, and is taking your marrow back to the sky.”

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Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story, including the word “Choice”.  Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.