The Meadow 61 Ever After Lenny DellaRocca After he left, the elder daughter walked to her grandmother’s house, lived the rest of her life on the burning wheel. Her soul dimmed on the floor like an old lamp. There was nothing in her blood when it came except tiny slivers of glass. When she dreamed she dreamed of charcoal because the silence in charcoal was at the heart of things she loved. The younger daughter, a shadow, lived in her room where her only friends were a bird and mouse playing with a tuning peg and bits of chiffon. They grew old and died. She dreamed of hummingbirds. The kind of hummingbirds that never appear in real life because their colors are beyond belief. Once a lady in a pink gown threw a pebble at her window. It sounded like a small prayer, like a story that could never come true. As for the mother, at first men lined up with gifts of chocolate and tulle, sang to her songs they learned from folks who came and went, and never asked questions, because everything seemed to hum. When everything hums there is no need for cruelty. But that changed after little black angels sprouted from her lips. She vandalized grace with rouge. When she fell in the kitchen years after the only daughter who loved her left with a woman who took photographs of stones with the face of Jesus in them, no one knew it. A terrible surge of leaves swirled around the house in a great red storm. It rained for the first time in years. Someone from town found a stranger bathing in the stream. There was a comet. There were rumors.
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