From the novel newly sold

The light of the real day is gone.  The lamplight is harsh.  My mother’s hands are blue blooded and thin and heavied down with her chin, and in the silence I remember her years ago, on the floor of a lost house, beside me.  She’d bought a long roll of waxed white paper and pots of finger paints and said, “We’ll paint what we dream.”  There wasn’t white in her hair.  There wasn’t night beneath her eyes.  She’d unrolled the paper across the whole wide of the floor and all afternoon we painted dreams.  Hers were blue like sky.  Mine were yellow-pink, like sun.  Afterwards, for the whole next week, her fingers were the color of the purple inside shadows.