Closer To Heaven - Patrick Sean Lee (rosie project .txt) 📗

In that moment, through all my tears, I knew. Charles had fallen in love with me. He was bound by his trust to nurture me—he might be dying in part because of that heavy burden—and so what final act of love could he give me that would be finer?

As the weeks passed cruelly by, his own deterioration growing by the day, and then the hour, I sang to him in seven notes as I sat at his bedside wiping his feverish brow. My wonderful Charles, who many years earlier I feared so deeply, smiled up at me—at all of us gathered—that moment he left.

They are waiting. Francis Jr. is busy exploring the dusty room, uninterested in this plain, black box. I begin to sing the first notes as everyone else holds their breath in anticipation. I wonder what we’ll find when the door we cannot see opens?

Publication Date: 06-24-2013

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
Gratefully: Sereni, my compass. Judy...so, so grateful to you! Michelle, Angely, Mary, Chris, Laz, and so many others who faithfully read and offered criticism, so thankfully received.