Mom

Defeated, he stumbled from behind the blackened and melted metals,

        internally crippled and instantly aged to Death’s door.

Their eyes met, the chaos surrounding them dissolved, and she swallowed whole the galaxy of agony his charred, broken, and bloodied body emitted…

He hobbled closer with the explicitness of their loss and the nuclei settled within the acid of her belly

        the neutrons split

her essence abruptly and ferociously exploded from within its vessel. It billowed up and outward into a huge, ominous cloud of those floating particles that are only visible through the sharp, reflected beams of the sun…

The atoms lingered there for long moments before brutally imploding back together within their husk.

And though the particles reformed, they were no longer whole. Many pieces were missing, left floating in the atmosphere.

What remained intact was instantly imprisoned within a distinct desolation. A vast and unbearable place where the darkened, emptiness encompassed her in a silence so piercing that it wrenched the air from her lungs and caused indefinable fear and confusion.

It dropped her to her knees with such excruciating agony that only the primal keens of a thousand ancient ancestors were able to form a voice to express it…

This — when your father’s face revealed to her your death.

Tammy S in loving memory of Larry Brown