King Midas | Isabella Liu (12)

Beside me: the silver watch your mother gave me last winter,

now covered with a thin veneer of golden dust. The earrings

you wore on our wedding day, twin aureate pearls once 

mirroring the alabaster glow of the moon. 

The pencil you always tuck behind your ear at work, now

writing scriptures in gold instead of lead. Dog-eared novels,

Scattered coins, stained with my fatal touch--glistening, hard, yet

brittle beneath the honey hum of our office lamp. 

Everything around us is gold, and you’ve begun 

to condemn my touch, calling my promise is a curse wrapped in

the illusion of wealth. I plead you to hold on for longer, to believe

that after I haul our riches to the shop three streets down,

the petals of our suffering will flower into something impossibly

beautiful. You open your mouth in protest, but our daughter

wades in, chubby hands clutching at my golden khakis. My

fingers, unwitting, graze the apples of her cheeks.

The blood in her body still. 

Her skin hardens, eyes shot 

open in fear. 

A second passes, and she is no longer

flesh and breath and warmth--

but something brittle, fragile, a statue

poised to shatter beneath the weight of air itself. 

Your voice returns, reminding me

of everything I couldn’t turn to gold, of everything

I’ve failed to save.