Shadow's Raised Me

He never knew a mother, only the black movement under stairwells, beneath rail bridges, inside burned-out tenements where the city hid its discarded dead. While the towers above traded light like a religion, the shadows fed him ash, taught him silence, and stitched his bones together from fear, oil, and the names scratched into concrete by the missing. Now the district that buried him hears him walking back through it. Streetlamps die one by one before he arrives. Windows fill with shapes that do not belong to the living. Every alley that once swallowed children opens behind him like a mouth, and the darkness that raised him finally comes to collect the rest.