In the silence, she feels her heart beating furiously, feels it strain at its moorings, trying to tear free of her chest and beat for him, because the heart of Parambil that toiled for so many years cannot do it any longer.

The chaos and hurt in God’s world are unfathomable mysteries, yet the Bible shows her that there is order beneath. As her father would say, “Faith is to know the pattern is there, even though none is visible.”

A man without a mustache is exposed and vulnerable, like an unbaptized child, the soul still in jeopardy.

All around her, the sounds of the land he made his and where he lived his life feel sharper and exaggerated:

It comes free with a splash, a pink jewel, a miracle that something so beautiful can emerge from water so murky.

It comes free with a splash, a pink jewel, a miracle that something so beautiful can emerge from water so murky.

begins to feel now for the first time lying under him: that she’s integral to his world, just as he is her world. She cannot imagine now that the pleasure she sees on his face will be something she too will experience from time to time, or that she’ll unobtrusively find ways to guide him in a manner that pleases her.

But such memories are woven from gossamer threads; time eats holes in the fabric, and these she must darn with myth and fable.

She pleads silently, Never grow old, never die, knowing it’s too much to ask. My rock, my fortress, my deliverer.