The Sanctuary Within
🌿 A short story born from this art…
The wind carried memories that night — of things that never were and might never be.
Maya stood at the lip of the abandoned meadow, her cropped hair catching moonlight like filings from a broken star. In her arms, the fawn she’d found three days ago pressed a tremor of life against her ribs. It had arrived in the storm — spindled legs, glassy eyes, need so pure it made her ache.
She hadn’t planned to keep it. She hadn’t planned for any of this.
Six weeks earlier, the doctor had said aggressive. The rest became paper birds with broken wings — percentages, timelines — fluttering without landing. While he spoke, rain braided the window into small rivers that led nowhere. Her family wanted a fight; they handed her war words like shields and spears. But disease didn’t feel like an enemy to defeat. It felt like a tide. She was learning to float.
The fawn stirred, breath warm against her neck. She’d named it Salam — peace — though she knew naming wild things braided you to what must be let go.
“You should go back to the forest,” she whispered, even as her arms refused to listen. A twitching ear grazed her chin. “Maybe your mother’s looking.”
They both knew she wasn’t. The storm had taken many things — old trees, power lines, certainties. The day after she’d found Salam, Maya shaved her head. Chemo would take it anyway; this way, the choice was hers. A small, stubborn sentence in a paragraph she couldn’t edit.
Her phone kept buzzing — friends checking in, relatives offering prayers — each message a tug on a life she was loosening, finger by finger, like a child letting go of a balloon string. The meadow lay silvered under the moon. Once it had been farmland, her grandmother said — corn lifting its green faces to July, harvest moons fat as promises. Abandonment had given it back to wildflowers. Beauty had found its way through neglect.
Salam tested its legs against her hold — then settled. Maya knew this choreography: the sway between holding and releasing. She had danced it with lovers, with futures, with versions of herself that no longer fit. Now she danced it with life itself.
“Not yet,” she murmured — to the fawn, to the wind, to her own pulse. Everything felt like water lately — essential, transient, impossible to keep.
A memory rose: Lily’s fifth birthday. Balloons let loose into a blue so clean it hurt. Where do they go, Mama? Maya hadn’t known then. She thought she might know now.
Lily lived with her father. Stability. Routine. A house without the rustle of hospital schedules. Maya visited when her body allowed, when the weight of pretending not to hurt didn’t grind her bones. Children learn the shape of truth faster than adults; Lily had stopped asking when Mama would get better.
The fawn’s nose tugged at her collarbone as if to tether her here. Maya had once read that deer avoided the sick. Salam stayed. Against the hush of the field their two heartbeats built a chapel.
In the kitchen drawer at home lay a treatment plan beneath unpaid bills and sympathy cards. The doctors were hopeful — that word bright as tin, heavy as lead. Hope, she’d learned, could also be a burden.
Wind lifted, and for a moment Maya imagined herself unspooling into it — molecules scattered across grass and starlight. The thought didn’t frighten her. It felt like a map she recognized.
Salam made a sound — not cry, not song. Something between. The noise matched the small keening that had lived in her chest for weeks. She kissed the soft crown, tasting rain and leaf.
“Tomorrow,” she promised. “Tomorrow I’ll teach you to run.”
But that night they stayed — two bodies in a hush big enough to be holy. The meadow whispered its old stories. The stars kept burning. And Maya understood that sometimes the bravest thing isn’t fighting or surrendering but standing still while the world goes on.
Dawn arrived in the tender colors of a truce. Maya opened her arms. Salam wobbled, stepped, then stepped again. At the edge of the meadow it looked back, eyes asking the question love always asks.
“Go,” she said — and meant it.
The fawn bounded toward the treeline, white tail bright as a syllable of hope. Maya watched until green swallowed it. Her arms stayed curved, shaped like an absence that still held. Sun warmed her scalp, her tired bones, the place inside her where resistance had loosened.
Laughter rose in her, sudden and clean. Birds startled. Joy blurred into tears until the difference didn’t matter.
Her phone rang. She answered without looking.
“Mom?” Lily. Bright, small. “Can you come see me today?”
Maya closed her eyes. Love weighted and light at once. “Yes, baby,” she said. “I’m coming.”
She walked home through tall grass, thinking of sanctuaries — the ones that aren’t places but moments: an opened hand, a shared breath, a goodbye brave enough to be honest. Maybe the fawn had given her that. Or maybe she had finally given it to herself.
The wind followed, carrying the scent of wild things and new mornings. She didn’t look back. Some releases return in other shapes — memory, strength, the quiet knowing that love isn’t measured by how tightly we hold, but by how wisely we let go.
