What do you want?”The question stunned him. He could say he wanted nothing, that he felt like nothing, that he counted the days until darkness. Hecould say: Happiness beyond all worlds! A life of peace and love, entire and whole! He could say he wanted everything and nothing all at once. He thought for a moment, as the birds sang in the trees, of how often he felt like this.

The moon is in a holding cell, grasped between the bones of his failing ribcage.

Each night he would give up on sleeping in his pain and drowning in his silence; he would watch the few stars that were in the sky that night, but he would never be living them. Something has taken his warmth and replaced it with a starless sky.

I live in sin.” The winged boy’s eyes hadturned downwards, his soft mouth setting grimly with despair. “To kill myself I live. No longer my life my own, but sin’s; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.

But the dream is over. He has no one to fly to now. He is among strangers, and his memories would only be a murmur in a darkened room lit by one, snuffing candle.

I’m fine,” is the reply he gives. I think I am surviving, in all the wrong ways, is the reply he thinks.

Here he was now, stuck in the labyrinth of his mind, a labyrinth of demolished roses,staring at the cosmos between his eyelids and feeling the star spots on his skin.