Semiannually, my mother and I always travel northwards to a quaint and blue cottage, surrounded by golden cornfields, and the occasional presence of two baby deer. The small remnant flock of geese we are, two individuals large, I would follow her internal compass towards the North Star, the little beacon of warmth known as the Pearson household

Constructed in the nineteenth-forties, the rustic rooms, numbering eight in total, are held together by wooden bearings that withstood the test of time. The clock seems to tick by within the blink of an eye, as well as pointing out the birds each hour, in this north wood paradise. But the heart, the hearth that warms the snow, bound together since birth hours apart, since the roaring twenties… or twenty-seven

Seventy-one years since marriage, the matron of the house, sat in a black chair was resting with us two tired geese spreading on separate couches… staring intently at the Wheel of Fortune. The clockwise rotation of the numbered colors may quite possibly hypnotize me into forgetting the bitter weeping I heard earlier in the morning, due to what the patron left behind. Sour crying of grandma because grandpa had died… left her lonesome

Last time I laid my eyes upon him was at his weakest. The man that smiled whether sunshine or rain, strong enough to hug a windstorm out of your lungs: he was withered and beat by the straining of his closing heart. The nerves on his skin tormented his being for the last months of life. My last memory saw him shirtless, covered in bloody scabs that reopened every single day, screaming out in pain from the medicine that never penetrated his mangled hide.

That was my last image of he who became a shell. The flock of geese flew along the clock hands, but counter-clockwise. Months passed. One day, that fateful phone call rang until my ears bled out in remorse. He died as the numb feeling of phantoms wracked my body, down south of the beacon. I long for the North Star. I longed for a time when showers didn’t leak from my grandmother’s eyes every single morning, each time she has a dream of his loving smile, his large and loud laugh, his illumination of the night sky when the dark seemed to overtake all of the northern wood and white snow. He carried the lamp. It’s left within the living quarters, dimly alighting Grandma’s house…
The gas is running out.
I have no matches.