Cotton Ball Clouds

little boy attending brother's funeral

The boy was only 6 years old when his brother died.

He was broken into bits and pieces, his clear glass heart shattered across the landscape of an earthy, trodden floor. His fragile innocence was clinging by a thread but the pristine quality of his soul never faded. He merely leaned his soft, childlike cheek on his mother’s shoulder and watched as slowly the coffin was lowered into the depths of a deep, dark hole.

The sky was a shimmering shade of blue and the clouds hung in the sky like billowy dresses on a brightly colored closet hanger. The boy, who was still so young that it was hard to sit still for so long, gazed up at the amorphous shapes with desperate curiosity.

He tugged at his mother’s dress, the color of charcoal, and began to ask her why the sky was so radiant on the day of his brother’s funeral, but she shushed him as some man began to speak. The boy was an obedient son and listened to her instructions, but this didn’t stop his mind from pondering the strange situation. As the speech moved on, the wispy polka-dots of the dazzling blue sky wandered about the back of the boy’s confounded head and persisted to make him confused. 

“A young man left our lives today. His soul is no longer with us and we will never be able to see the young face we all held so dearly to our hearts.” The boy listens with as much interest as a 6 year old can give and lets each new word sink in. He listens as the man talks of how life will persist without his brother and each new reality is yet another spear thrown at his fragmented heart. As every phrase leaves a newly formed bruise, the boy begins to feel sadness and confusion once more as he watches the man on the stage talk without a single tear. Not once does the speaker seem emotional about the funeral and the boy does not understand. He doesn’t understand at all. 

He begins to sob. 

The racking wail of the child sends shudders down the backs of those around him, yet the pale, thin words of the speech being made continue to pierce and stab at the boy’s already splintered soul. No one comes to the boy’s aid and he buries his face in his mother’s dress, the black of her clothes engulfing his head in it’s dark realm. “Why isn’t he sad, mommy?” He asks softly, still choking on tiny gulps of salty water. “Why isn’t he crying?” She pats his head gently, and doesn’t respond. The boy is alone in his misery and alone in a black, shadowy world. 

He cries himself to sleep at his brother’s funeral to the lullaby of empty words.

And he dreams of cotton-ball clouds floating in a field of blue.