She sits on the wall with her shoes undone
Swinging her legs and watching the laces swing back toward the crudely stacked bricks
And hit them.
Sun-marked fingers curled over the edge, she observes the scattered eggshells below.
It’s long been since the fall, yet she still sees the way he cracked under their kicks,
The way the grass withered and gave way to the frozen soil beneath,
And the way he shattered with the sigh of a kingdom who,
Really,
Couldn’t put him back together again.
She still sees a fall he couldn’t wake up from, startled and relieved
To find his face pressed against a pillow,
A fall with no mattress or outstretched arms at the other end,
A fall to be ridiculed for being nothing more than a talking egg.
Still,
She figures,
It must’ve hurt.
She leans over father, tries to pick up the eggshells, and scrapes her knee instead.
She looks down at her feet. How silly.
She stands up,
Ties her shoelaces,
And walks off.
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