• Snow ices the thatched roofs, icicles hanging down from window sills. It is a white, barren landscape. As they tuck Sebastian Winsted to lie, forever in the ground, the wind blows harshly across the mountainside.
    The people shiver as the pastor recites his prayers. Snow flurries land on the people’s black attire. Women with hats that conceal their faces weep quietly in their husband’s shoulders. Sebastian’s young classmates peer off into the cemetery, looking anywhere other than each other’s faces.
    Martha is not at the funeral.
    She is in the field. She had stumbled out of the house breathlessly, without the proper clothing for the weather. She can hear the pastor from where she stands in the field, lilies dead and buried in the snow fall-
    “Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in
    me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I
    have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”
    She can hear him, loud and clear, and her son is beside her. He holds her hand. Words begin to tumble from his mouth,
    “And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way where I am going.” She can feel her son’s hand around her own. But there is no warmth. There is only her four-year-old and the words that fall. The mountain is etched into the skyline.

    She finishes, “Thomas said to Him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are
    going; how can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way,
    and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me’”     she is surprised. She had not been to church since she was a little girl.
    Martha falls to her knees in the snow, her child kneeling before her, his small hand tucked in her own. Hollow words pour out, black bags beneath his eyes.
    “In the sure hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our
    Lord Jesus Christ, we commit the body of this child to the ground.”    “Stop it,” She sobs, “Stop it now!” She pounds her fists gently into the child’s silent chest.
    The child does not understand.
    “The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make His face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him, the Lord lift up His countenance upon him and give him peace, both now and evermore.”
    “Amen,” she whispers in unison with the child. “My baby,” she cries, stroking his cheek. But, no, there is no warmth. Her child is cold and dead beneath the ground, like the thousands of lilies under her.

    The child tugs on her arm, pointing to the sky; his little forehead is wrinkled in determination.
    “No, baby,” she says, looking away. “I can’t come with you.”
    “Mama?” the child asks.
    “I can’t.”
    “Geoffrey?” he asks, sending a ripple of pain through her.
    “Geoffrey is gone. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know where Geoffy is,” Martha smiles, as she uses Sebastian’s nickname for Geoffrey. Martha had let her twelve-year-old boy drift away from her in her depression, swallowed in guilt, and he had run away from home.
    “Daddy?”
    Martha does not answer. The child’s ears perk up; he turns his head to the side.”Do you hear that Mama? The trees are whispering. I can hear them,” he says.
    She looks into the distance. She can see the white snow, like she is in the ocean, floating in the cold ocean. Farther back, there are pine trees, swaying in the breeze. And for a moment, she can hear them whispering.
    Sebastian stands in the snow, his hair blowing slightly. He is still dressed in the overalls she put him in the day he died. He wears no coat. His skin is ice gray, His pale, green eyes, her eyes, ghostly against his hollow cheeks. The sky is gray and forlorn, tufts of pearly snow flake cascading to the ground. Martha sees no beauty.
    “What are they saying?” she asks.
    “They say that I am to be with you,” he says as Martha shakes her head mechanically.
    “You don’t belong here anymore,” she tells her boy reluctantly.
    “Why do you say that?” he asks innocently, his forehead creasing, this time in anxiety.
    The boy’s hair starts to drip. Water dripping off his hands, his arms. As if the snow has fallen on him and melted, the child begins to dissolve. His hands are cold and hard in her own.
    Martha remembers the hummingbird that had flown into the side of her house when she was a child. It lay on the ground, crushed and broken. She tried her best to nurse it back to health. The days grew on and the hummingbird showed improvement. Its gold flecked green wings began to beat again. Excitedly, she let it free outside, where it flew away.
    She realizes this is what she must do. She nursed the child while he was on Earth, and now he is God’s joy. God’s angel.
    She must let Sebastian go.
    She watches as her boy trickles into the ground, one by one, droplets of rain that are no more. His pale eyes plead, scared. He places his hands over his dripping heart.
    “Forever, Mama?”
    “Yes baby. Forever. They will take care of you up there. And I will see you again one day.”
    She touches his hands, and a flicker of warmth jolts between them, and the child fades into the snow. Then, a whisper of wind the color of the moon blows up from the ground, stretching along the buried wheat grass field, and he is sucked up into the sky.
    “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away: blessed be the name
    of the Lord,”     The pastor finishes in the cemetery, straightening his collar. And the pastor realizes that the boy’s family is not there.
    Not a single one.