His fingers once danced soft-shoe on counters, cast shadows on walls, and flew around rooms gathering storms filled with tales. Stories still wanting telling from his numbed hands.
‘Imagining birds,’ he said, ‘is easier than darkness. Easier than the murmuration across my brow.’
Now he sat, staring deeply into his palm, tracing patterns, hoping for a life line to save him, some story to explain, in a language soon to be forgotten.
In the end, his hands fell mute.