The child is alone. Home. Without walls. The ground is wet with snow cover, slush & icy mud. His toes frozen beyond his senses. His eyes dry and cracked from the frozen film of earlier tears, his vision clouded. His cheek, a mix of swollen heat and frosted blood. Goosebumps under his sweater, his coat hanging in his closet. The wind throws him off balance, he tries to regain his footing, but slips on black ice.
His left hand scuffed from the fall, his wrist sore, likely bruised. His jeans soaked and salted, rigid and stiff, it's a mere 20 degrees, with colder windchills, and it's even colder inside him, and all he knows...is alone.
He looks to his soul for enough warmth to survive the night, secretly he wishes for hypothermia. The warmth is just to dull the pain. New tears wish to fall, but cannot escape the rheum of ice that holds them in. His teeth chatter and his bones shake.
The woods are dead, but the cemetery is alive. Home, for the night. The mausoleum is locked. An open grave offers shelter from the wind, and so he climbs in. He punches the wall of dirt, his prayer to the sandman. He wipes the blood between his hands...his hands to his face...he lies down...hoping to never wake back up into his living death.
The cold takes him...but his punishment is far from over. He awakes crisp, crunchy...pallid and pale blue, with blood encrusted streaks and scabbed hands. The sky is clear, the air frigid. it takes several minutes for his rigamortis to ease enough for him to stand and crawl out of the earth.
He looks around to a blanket of white and gray stones. Pain and hurt in every direction. He has nowhere to go...nowhere but home...shivering voilently, he looks down, his knees can no longer support his weight; they buckle...it's either take one step, or...
...he falls back home.
