Betty Stanton

Morning confessions churn in her throat like ash, though there is no altar, no listener, only the habit of speaking to herself in half-finished sentences. The words rasp, brittle, and fall apart before they reach the air.

Mirrors no longer flatter, chairs grow harder, nights longer. The house smells of dust and the faint iron of rain.

What remains is a slow ruin in the shape of a life - walls thinning, plaster shedding, memory gnawed hollow. She drifts from room to room, touching framed photographs of relatives she does not remember the names of, waiting for recognition that does not come.

Be holy or be nothing, she heard once, but now it means only: endure or vanish. She holds the words like pebbles in her palm, cold and heavy, useless.

Someone said the word sacrifice, but it tasted like salt. She remembers swallowing it, remembers the way it burned her throat. Now she keeps her mouth full of ash, a ruin in a ruined house, the prayer unfinished but burning anyway.

I walk toward the place where we first stepped when we had no homes, no reason to stop for relics. The air was swollen with laughter then, loud with its own wealth before cameras swallowed me whole and you kept the moon on a leash.

Today it is different. She runs into you now, frantic with her need to be everything to you. She holds herself out like an offering, and you take her in. I move slowly. I will not rearrange my body for you. I will not fracture into your shape. Time chisels us into acceptance. There is no winning. Only waiting. She believes you two can be one. I believe it too. Belief is nothing but surrender.

The wind is humid. It brushes past like the breath of something already buried in these backyard echoes of childhood. Play collapses into schedule. Love collapses into habit and I walk toward the place where we first stepped when we had no homes, no reason to stop. I carry the silence that comes after.

—Betty Stanton

I was hired to collect what was left of the light.

At first it was too fragile. I didn’t understand the way it clung to shards of old glass and drifted through dust like lost scriptures. Eventually I learned how to handle it, and now I keep it in jars labelled with years that no longer mean anything.

When the others sleep, I open them. The light moves, restless, as if it remembers the fields and faces it is meant for. I’m the only one of us who can hear the way it hums, who can understand it. It sings that bodies still want to be seen in the light.

I send my findings into the dark.