By Murray Eiland
Butterflies float, silent specters in the air,
hovering over withering flowers, their wings darkening
in the thin spring light, where laughter fades to whispers
and shadowed dogs prowl in eerie silence.
"Hold it tight, Andrew, don’t let it fall,"
the words cut into his mind, iron and ice,
as he sprints, the kite a limp tail of color
dragged by the wind in a sky dimmed with dusk.
His mother’s eyes follow, her face taut, unreadable,
her voice urgent—a shiver in the air—
"Be ready," she calls, her gaze hollow and glassy,
while his father clutches his head, despair taut as wire.
A sudden, guttural cry tears from his father’s throat,
"Goddammit," he chokes, panic carved deep,
as the kite plunges down, a fatal descent,
and Andrew hears the sharp, deafening blast that steals his light.
Andrew’s world is cloaked in murky silence, his senses dulled,
waking to a sterile voice, soft and distant,
explaining the crash, the emptiness that stole
his legs, left him caged and unseeing, in relentless night.
Doctors murmur grimly—there’s nothing to restore—
but the heaviest weight hangs in the still air:
the loss of voices, of presence, his parents’ warmth drained
from his world, leaving only a jagged void.
Andrew is told they are gone, faint and haunting echoes,
But sleep is a chasm where shadows reign sovereign,
And he’s drawn back, again and again, to that field,
To the fleeting freedom, the cruel mirage of the park.
In dreams, he roams where clarity dissolves,
Watching his parents, their shapes blurred and shifting,
The kite ascending in endless, mocking loops,
Its string in his hand, but the darkness already waiting.
He knows what lurks—no surprise in the shadowed realm—
an ever-present shape with outstretched claws,
its eyes voids as deep as the starless night,
its limbs like vines, twisted black, swallowing light.
They encircle him, darker than despair,
each tendril coiling tight, hungry and unyielding,
binding him in a grip that drains, suffocates,
as Andrew’s spirit strains against the closing dark.
His heartbeat flutters, a trapped bird in his chest,
his breaths shallow gasps, thin threads of resistance,
but the shadowed grip only tightens, relentless,
and in this dream, there is no escape, only night.