Outside the sun spoke to them, words spilt gently out of its glowing, burning lips and onto Gabriel and Madeleine's heads warming their bodies and bringing tears to their eyes as they squinted to shield themselves. They could not hear these letters and phrases and sentences but they could feel them and see them as they dipped and dived trying to reach the earth. Then the words stopped, something had intercepted them, a cloud hovering above their heads muted the light but they were not worried, eventually it would return it always did.
"I want to show you something," Madeleine said as the sun kissed her cheeks.

"What is it?" Gabriel asked.
"You'll see."
Walking slowly, Madeleine led Gabriel behind their barn. As they walked alongside its lofty paneling Gabriel looked up and down at the fading red paint on the sides of the old building. Brownish gray splotches of wood shined through at spots where the paint had chipped off. Gabriel reached out his hand and washed his fingers across the planks that held up the roof. The edges of the chipping paint dug into his fingertips and popped off of the wood like dead skin ready to let the layer below it take its place.
As he followed Madeleine behind the barn trees began to rise around him, their bark was wrinkled and cracked like lips of a dead man waiting to be buried. Brown splinters of bark jutted out from off the surface of a large maple tree. A strip had been torn off by the wind, showing its naked insides, bloody and scabbed over. Just beyond the maple a small stretch of grass extended across the ground. The sun shined brightly down upon the opening as if it were the light of God shining on some holy spot. Now Gabriel could see four white crosses teetering on their tired legs while rays of light burned their outstretched arms. And as the wind blew across their bodies they trembled ever so slightly.
"When you told me about your colt it reminded me of this and I realized I haven't been back here in quite a while," Madeleine said standing in the light that gazed down on them through the trees that were now full of leaves.
"What are they?" Gabriel asked with wide eyes.
"The pets we've had over the years, three of them are dogs and the other one is just a dead squirrel we found in the backyard. It didn't feel right to just throw it away though," Madeleine said looking at the crosses. "Zeke, the last of the dogs we had died about two years ago and we just never got a new one. We had him for so long he became kind of irreplaceable I guess. But eventually his health started to fail and one night he went to sleep and never woke up."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"He was old and it was just his time to go."
"I just hope we can be that lucky."
"I wish Lila could've been that lucky," Madeleine said with her eyes unfocused on Zeke's grave.
Seeing the pain build up in the blue rings of Madeleine's eyes, Gabriel put his hand across the base of her back. His touch could not have been any stiffer than the breeze shaking the leaves and through the thin cloth of Madeleine's sun dress his hand seemed to be nothing more than the petals of a flower tickling her spine.

From: The Ground Beneath our Feet

Learn more about this author, Scott Woznicki.
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