• Rain danced around, its melancholy song heard in plunks and pips; a small boy, no older than eight set at a skip through the pour, a white rose clasped in his hand.
    He hummed a song only he knew, the rose bent in his palm as if trying to kiss his wrist. It was for his mother, the rose, and he took joy in watching the clear drops wipe across the flower’s petals, creating the glimmer of false silver, as though its worth was much more than a strut to the garden.
    His smile faltered as he approached the tall wooden door that marked his home. He looked upward to the rain, as though asking for its permission for him to leave its soak but long enough to gift his mother the white rose.
    He nodded as though the rain had granted him the privilege of entering his own home, and set inside.
    He instantly felt wary, and gripped the rose in both of his dripping, small hands; daring anyone- anything to pry it from his grasp. The home reeked of decay. The very air screamed in insult as sickness flooded into it, and kissed it with a condescending air of its own.
    The boy imagined a black sulfurous cloud dancing around him, enveloping him and searching him for a weakness. He stood wavering on the spot in fear. Yet he knew that the sulfurous demon would vanish in a moment as he heard his mother’s awful, shuddering, rattling breath and the cloud was sucked into its source- his sick, dying mother.
    The boy stepped with caution towards the bed. His mother wheezed and he flinched backwards as the sulfurous monster again swept from nothingness into the dank room. He whimpered, his knees buckling in fear of the faceless demon that only he could see.
    The boy gripped the white rose yet harder, and had to put all mental thought into cupping his fists so that they did not strangle the bloom.
    His mother’s eyes snapped open at the pitiful noise of a fearful boy. Her gaze shown dull and malignant as though faint azure marbles had replaced her once-fiery sapphire globes. At once, the black demon howled and faded for an uncountable time, yet unlike the many other times it vanished, his mother continued to rattle her breath, as though those azure marble eyes held a power against it.
    “Son…” came a faint whisper that could have been the sigh of a fly, or the kiss of the wind. The boy shuttered at the slight sound, and looked about for the speaker. “Son…” The word came again, and the boy knew at last that it had been uttered by his mother.
    The boy paused before whispering back, “Yes, Mother?” He twiddled his thumbs about the white rose’s fine stem, fingering a thorn with his thumb.
    The mother blinked her azure marbles so slowly that time might have stopped and a faint black wisp trailed from her mouth as the last peel of blue hid behind her lids. The boy stepped back and the mother opened her eyes once more with the same languish of her time-stopping blink, “Come…closer…” she seemed to suggest as the sulfur cloud vanished, but the boy was once again not sure who the speaker was. He looked about for a fly that might have sighed, or an open window that might have let the wind through to kiss his ear, but neither existed in that room. It was, yet again, his mother’s dreadfully weak voice.
    He shuffled forward, the rose held before his face as he crumpled his head down to his shoulder as a content duck might. He approached his mother’s bedside with a racing heart and shaking hands, dreading that her eyes might again close and the black demon might have another chance to rob into him.
    “Son…” She said again as he finally stood by her side, shaking vigorously with fear.
    He stared at his mother, taking in every contour of her broken, lined face. Her cheeks, once full with blossoms, now greyed and froze and her lips that he had always seen cloaked in glosses now seemed a strait, boring line a railway track might bear. “Yes… Mother?” He asked, clutching the white rose to his heart, as though it had never been intended a gift for her and that it might merely stay with him in his quavering grip.
    She smiled at his voice, taking no notice of the rose, “What a good… boy…” She whispered, raising her hand to trace his face in the air. The marbles that had replaced her eyes began to slowly close; the sulfurous cloud inched from her languid lips. The boy backed away an inch, but his mother blinked in the familiar rapid swing of life and it dissipated once more. She now stared at him with sad eyes, as though she felt herself a beast that he had stepped back from her touch. As was such, since the black demon was nothing more to her than the foul taste of sickness.
    She lowered her hand, her eyes flashing to the side in a moment of thought. She thought of why her son, her very son now feared her; why he backed away from her loving touch… She told herself it was because she was sick, that the boy feared catching her unattainable sickness through the simple touch of the ill, even though youth protected him more than any medicine any doctor could supply.
    Guilt slapped the boy with the force of a thousand angered demons. He looked down at the precise time his mother’s azure marble eyes veered away, and he spared a moment of thought. He thought of why she did not fear the sulfurous demon, even though it was from her very breast. He had no way of knowing that his mother’s eyes could not perceive the beast, and so he told himself that she had concurred her fear of the sulfurous cloud long ago in the waning years of her youth.
    His grip tightened to a straining point upon the white rose’s stem in an unconscious way. The rose bent so far as to kiss his wrist, and the boy looked down on the white petals with a new aspect. It was for his mother, this rose, and if she were to die before he gifted her with the bloom then its thorns would stab at him with a guilty vengeance, and its somber petals, however white, would shadow him forever more.
    But the rose was ruined. Its stem now bent in uncountable angles, a third of the petals had been lost and four more shredded by his twitching fingers.
    The boy held the broken rose in his open hands as if it had been the greatest treasure, the most priceless loot, and that it had fallen into tar and been soiled by a rotten child.
    He felt hot tears roll down his cheeks and heard them drop to the wooden floor with hollow plunks and pips. A single tear met the rose; finding root in the pollen-filled dais where it dyed the center a faint yellow. Nothing could tear the boy from his beaten rose, his tears, or his guilt; nothing but a groan from his mother as she raised herself into a sitting position as she had not been able to do in weeks of illness and gave an exasperated sigh of pain.
    She fell back to her pillows, her hand over her heart as she twitched slightly in anguish. Her son flung to her side, ignoring the black demon as his mother’s marbles shut and it drifted before him. If his sick and dying mother could brave it in her chest, he might but bear it in his eyes.
    “Mother,” He said, leaning over her, the ruined white rose in his hand, gripped tight so that it stood bright against his stark knuckles. His mother’s thin mouth twitched into a pained sneer as her azure marbles swept into focus.
    The boy knew that without a doubt his mother was no longer for this world. He had watched restlessly as her soft eyes had turned to glass marbles and now witnessed a new metamorphosis as the azure marbles altered, glaring at him in the form of bleached stones.
    She mouthed a single word that might have been ‘Son’ and he listened to the silent word that would be his mother’s last.
    They exchanged an awkward look as young soft hazel eyes met old illness-hardened stones. And an impulse brushed his mind as he dreaded this glance becoming her last sight. “I brought you a rose.” He told her, lifting the meager, shredded bloom to her hands.
    Her stony eyes traced the flower in the same content as he had her lined face. The boy dreaded her reaction, and was struck with a wave of immanent joy as her boney mouth twitched into a gleaming smile that brought back a portion of her former beauty.
    Clasping the rose to her heart, her eyes closed. The boy might have thought her asleep were it not for the faint silver mist that rose from her lips as the black demon once had.