The Prodigal

Alisha says: Play in the Jereboam Winter is an icy enterprise. I peer through the skeleton forest, watch Electra practise her wise manouevres, a raven flip, winged in the colours of the storm, she performs perfect dark circles until Rafael interrupts her play and crowns her with celandines stolen from the river's mouth. She sinks beneath the warm veil of his kiss, and I am hollowed out with pride and longing. My rough rouged cheeks pinched  a sudden red but maybe that's the cold. He bends his mouth to her ear. Her reply is a masterpiece of silent cinema, with both of them laughing and mouthing words into the air, making language visible, high vaulted with desire. I nurse my rookish passion for them both, a mad maternal instinct from this nursery-rimed cradle in the trees. My legs are crooked stiff. The dead are etched into the living. I am as clear as a piece of glass.  And I ask you: Who'd be a mother to such ingrate innocence?