You are gnarled. Like an old woman’s hand reaching up to the pale morning sky. Worn and arthritic you remain stock still. On the rare occasion that you do move it is with immense and immeasurable pain. You stand as a testament to time that although nature has thrown everything she can at you, you remain whole and resolute.
Yet looking closer there are scars, too. Small ones. Three in particular. One from fire, one from a child and one from a man. They tell a story where all the characters are just phantoms lost to memory and time and where the circumstances are obscured by an indistinct fog and only the physical marks remain.
In some places the skin has come off; taken away by a blade, or maybe something similar. Where it has grown back there are darker patches that seem somehow odd, as if they do not belong to you but to some other, alien being.
There is a thump.
A creak, a groan and a crack.
Are you struggling to move, to reanimate in the cold winter air? No, because slowly you turn away from that sky, revealing parts of you that have never before seen sunlight. And they are joyous in its distant warmth. That rapture is short lived. Your death is a silent scream except that there are witnesses, who watch without awe as you fall with undignified speed. The event occurs without grace. You are not the morning star. They hear you crash with a broken, dulled thump.
