I am a window.
The light comes through me, but it does not stay. It passes through the glass, hits the floor, and turns into shadows. I watch the white falling outside. It is constant. It is quiet. It is the only thing that makes sense because it does not try to be other than a slow, descending erasure.
Behind me, the house is loud.
There is a man. He moves like a puppet with tangled strings. He calls himself—I don't remember. He makes sounds that are supposed to be music, but to me, they are just vibrations in the air. He is wearing an apron. He is flipping something on the stove. He is trying so hard to fill the silence, but the silence is too loud. It is a mouth that swallows every word he says.
I am sitting at the table. My tea is cold. It has been cold for a long time, or perhaps it was never hot.
I hear her. The one they call Eluned.
She is upstairs. She is in the hallway. She is in the bathroom. I feel the floorboards tremble slightly under her weight, a ghost of a sensation against the soles of my feet. She is the reason for puppet's dance. She is the reason the window is still here.
She comes down.
I feel her shadow across the table. I do not turn my head. If I turn my head, the world might tilt, and the white outside might spill into the room. I keep my eyes on the horizon, where the gray sky meets the gray earth.
Then, a shift.
The air becomes cold. Not the cold of winter, but the cold of a void. The man stops singing. His breath hitches. I can hear the grinding of his teeth, a sound like gravel being crushed. Something is wrong. The light in the room is changing. It is losing its gold. It is becoming sharp, clinical, like the light in a room where things are dissected.
I feel her looking at me. Not at my face, but through me. She is looking at the emptiness where my dreams used to be. She is looking at the hollow space I gave her so she could breathe.
Man : "Wait, wait, wait!"
The man's voice is a frantic chirp. He is moving. He is spinning her. He is pushing her back toward the small room with the porcelain sink.
Man : "You forgot your magic windows, silly-billy!"
His voice is trembling. He is terrified. He is afraid that if she looks too long, the glass will break and we will all fall out of the story. He is protecting the lie. He is the architect of this cage, and he is desperately trying to patch the cracks in the wall.
I stay still. I am the anchor. I am the silence that allows the world to exist.
She returns. The gold comes back to the room, but it feels heavy, like wet paint. I feel her hand on my cheek. It is a warm pressure, a distant memory of a touch. I adjust my facial muscles. I tilt the corners of my mouth upward by three millimeters. It is the response required by the script.
Man : "There we go!"
The man claps.
The tea is still cold. The snow is still falling.
I am Claire. I am the one who believed in the dream so much that I became the bed it lies on. I gave her my eyes so she wouldn't have to see the dark, and now I sit here, a beautiful, empty vessel, watching the world disappear into a white screen.