'Wishing Away the Loss of my Mother' by Maria Thomas

Summer turns to Spring, turns to Autumn. Flowers shrink to buds, to spears, to a promise of colour. Trees absorb their leaves, bare bones x-rayed against the leaden skies.

The puffball-mass in your brain doesn’t send its destructive cargo through your canals and waterways. It doesn’t explode, its spores destroying tissues and synapses and functions. It diminishes: once an orange, now a lime, a kumquat, a nothing. You don’t breathe your last in the unreality of an August dawn.