Her voice echoed in the walls, if ever so faintly now, a memory folded into the house. Her sneakers lay cold by the front door, the left one on it's side, with frayed laces once wet and muddy and now glued to the floor in dried gray dirt. Henry didn't have the time or the inclination to clean.
He stood in the bedroom doorway, looking at the pillows on the bed, still propped up, still depressed in the middle where she'd lain for the last week, hardly moving. The metal stand for the morphine drip still stood in the corner, but absent its bag of liquid. The winter that was breaking to spring outside still existed inside him, and grew steadily worse, to a blizzard, as he gradually realized her absence, the lack of her smile, the now impossibility of her fingers brushing his cheek, the hollowness in the room brought on by the dearth of her laughter.
The winds of blizzard swirled up, he curled his fist and slammed it into the wall, fracturing the paint she'd put there, two decades ago. He punched again, but the wall wasn't hard enough to quell the blizzard. He closed his eyes tight, and opened his mouth in a loud silent scream, and held it until he couldn't breath. He slumped against the doorjamb, and slid down it to the floor. He panted, his sinuses stuffed, but still no tears came. His legs went numb and he watched the sun race across the wall and he felt time pass and try to pull him along, and when the sun went down, he could no longer resist the passage.
"Why can't you come back home?" he asked. "Why?"
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Check out the song here:
Follow the band @tinstarorphans on Twitter, or Zachary Bennett (the guy singing above) @tinstarzachary.
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