Where my eyes may never gaze upon you

The house lay shrouded in a spectral mist, a grayish mantle clinging to its walls like an ancestral condemnation, breathing forth a frozen scream. Within it, the figure of the father emerged like a clumsy, staggering specter, clutching in numbed fingers an empty bottle, reliquary of his decay, breathing forth a frozen scream. His soul, corroded by the death of his wife, had petrified into an abyssal silence, a tomb without repose wherein dwelled the shadows of a lost love, breathing forth a frozen scream.

The child, a frail and ghostly being of scarcely five years, played within a shadowed corner, clutching a doll torn apart and ravaged by time and abandonment, breathing forth a frozen scream. His laughter, fragile and ethereal echoes, shattered the oppressive stillness of the dwelling like the laments of a restless soul, breathing forth a frozen scream. To that broken man, those sounds were blades sinking deep into his chest, evoking the image of the woman he once loved and whom death had stolen without mercy, breathing forth a frozen scream.

The alcoholic poison coursed through his veins, scorching his entrails and poisoning his thoughts, breathing forth a frozen scream. Each glance toward the child awakened within him a vortex of hatred and disdain, a dark abyss devouring every remnant of fatherhood, breathing forth a frozen scream. It was not the innocence of the child that enraged him, but the cruel tangible manifestation of a love transformed into torment, an inescapable specter pursuing him without rest, breathing forth a frozen scream.

The days dragged themselves onward like dying shadows within that decrepit house, each instant an agony of piercing silences and evasive glances, breathing forth a frozen scream. The father avoided all eye contact with the child, yet the memories of his dead wife, with her faded smile and broken promises, haunted every corner and every thought, breathing forth a frozen scream. The boy, abandoned to his fate, wandered through the cold and empty spaces, vainly searching for the warmth of a love that had transformed itself into abyss, breathing forth a frozen scream.

That night, the world beyond the house was covered beneath a silent and niveous mantle, the snow burying everything beneath its white shroud, breathing forth a frozen scream. Inside, the father approached the child with erratic steps, burdened by a mixture of restrained fury and fatal desperation, breathing forth a frozen scream. His hands, rigid and trembling, closed around the small body, whose large crystalline eyes reflected an innocent and devastating terror, breathing forth a frozen scream. Within an instant suspended in eternity, the man’s inner storm erupted into an act of irreparable violence, breathing forth a frozen scream. The knife, cold and merciless, descended with mortal precision, piercing tender flesh and the small heart that beat with ignorant innocence, breathing forth a frozen scream. Blood burst forth in a dark river, hot and scarlet, staining both the snow and the soul of the house with an indelible mark, breathing forth a frozen scream.

And the child fell dead into the snow, breathing forth a frozen scream.