We hear a muddled voice, speaking in rhythm and de facto secrecy, repeating…memorized lines…a religious act…or an act of mild mannered madness.

Blues and greys fading to black fill the blanks of the walls, a small white bed somewhere in center.

A Victorian nonchalance hangs in the air as it does in her hair, brunette curls sleeping, a dress of white diffusing the permeating pigments of a Lazy D.C. locked within a dream.

She…it…stirs from the words as we slip to their source…a gentle and seemless fade of our senses.

His color the same air that takes his breath, all are thrown in silhouette, a darkness forever more the rest, he faces the wall as his nature, a small podium, an insignificant altar that can only offer paper to sacrifice. Menace in shadows, though calmly so, the length of something held by his hand shines from the darkness as its point makes it to the floor.

“Father?”

She is awake, sitting at the edge of her bed, uncertain concern and a waking confusion. He speaks, not in answer, but in simple desperate repetition.

“Father, what is it?”

Again…the dissolve of knowing…and we see him still in place, his hand the only movement, straining around the handle of what he holds in his hand, shoring his grip.

He secures a position much to his confidence…

…and we see her eyes, and her eyes only, woken from a life…

“Speak to me, please.”

Lost in the milky whites of her eyes…

His words join the air and are lost within.

Fragments are believed to be heard and put in order by those who care to do so, such actions grading the differences in quality, creating an instrument from ether, making some actions impossible and others unavoidable.

She rises…

We follow her as she cautiously walks around her bed…concern for herself present only in the back of her mind, hers for him leading the away. Her ears are ours, and as we barely approach, we hear more clearly.

“…all there are are eyes…in the end…our eyes…”

His presence dissolved more and more into the dark projection, the blade a glimmer the only light and barely escaping, his words do other wise and fall to the gravity of the situation.

“Father? Curse you! What is the matter?”

She makes her final approach, but we do not. A flickering shuffle of our senses we lose her at the last moment, our audience taken up by an older woman, dressed much the same, sitting on a chair, trails of long fallen tears permanently lining her face, our own bleeding not makeup but the scene itself, tearing into densest black.

“Father?”

“Eyes!”

A feminine gasp, two slashes, nothing to scream,,,

,,,a beat not lost, he returns to his words…a wash of greys and blues, blacks lining the edges and whites the in-between…the blood of the past returning to its source…

“Father?”

“Father, what is it?”