The Light in her Tears

For H, and The Sunday Muse prompt #170:

** She lingers like a ghost in the night, this memory of my mother, framed by a distant light: the stately stillness of her furrowed brow, the slight tilt of her chin catching the light, defiant.

The moment when the lone tear hangs - perched impossibly as though straining against the world - comes to me again and again in a vision of the night, its lingering like a thread tethering me in my seasons of incertitude.