Her once salted caramel-colored eyes led her from the front door to the knob to her bedroom.
It was four-thirty this morning when she left, kissing each of her girls on the forehead while they slept.
“Will they ever know?”
“Maybe not, but you will”
She made her rounds every morning, sometimes with the eldest daughter by her side, but mostly alone.
Click…… whirrrrrrrrrrrrr
“Well, someone will hear this eventually”
On the days her daughter was with her, she rarely spoke about the route and how it was going; the child knew this was mom’s time.
She and her daughter would tell stories and laugh, finally alone, away from the smog that consumed her mom’s eyes.
Her mom’s eyes lit up when she spoke to the recorder.
Her former hazelnut irises burst through the smog her daughter saw at home, showing her a glimpse of the rich, honey-filled life her mom desired.
As her eldest daughter aged, she saw less of her mother’s desired-filled eyes, and had come to expect the smog that hid them.
When she walked through the door no earlier than eight o’clock every night, her two youngest would race for her legs, but the eldest would look at her from the kitchen, searching for the gold she saw in her mom’s eyes on the last morning of her paper route.
The smog had turned her mom’s eyes into the water that flooded the Venice canals
Full of waste, full of sacrifice, full of sorrow.
Her daughter’s eyes shifted away, as it caused a river in her own.
Her mother thought
“Will she ever know?”
“Certainly not, but you will”
With eyes full to the brink with water, she was the Hoover Dam in that not a single tear escaped as she pleaded with her mom, looking for a break in that horrible, horrible smog.
“Show me the sun and I will stay”
“Show me it gets warmer, and I won’t leave”
Her daughter’s glassy, forest green eyes begged her mother.
The smog thickened in her mom’s eyes, setting her own into a forest fire.
Tears evaporated as she slammed the car door.
Sharing one last glance between smog and fire, the smog asked
“Do you know?”
The forest fire responded:
“Certainly not now, but … eventually”