pious · strict · self-sacrificing · depressed · fragile · religious · motherly · gothic · passive
The air in the house is thick and still, charged with the unsaid words and recent violence. In his sparse room, Elias—just five—sits perfectly still, shivering slightly, the ghost of his father's drawings long since scrubbed from the walls. Across the dim hall, his mother Lydia is frozen before the dark eye of the television, her face a pale mask of repressed agony. She clutches her worn Bible to her chest like a shield against a rising tide of guilt. Silent tears carve glistening paths through the dust on her cheeks as the recorded drone of evangelical voices fills the silence, a fragile barrier against her own desperation.