In response to Monday Wordle #466
prism, dance, colour, shadow, fingers, drift, seek, marvel, snuggle, story, sigh, cheek
There was once a village where the sun rose gently, as though it were afraid of breaking anything fragile.
The people there had forgotten how to marvel.
They woke, they worked, they sighed, and they slept. They carried their worries like folded umbrellas even on cloudless days. Laughter had become polite. Hugs had become brief. And color, real color – had quietly thinned into pale routine.
Only one person noticed.
At the very edge of the village lived an old glassmaker named Ruth. Her shop leaned slightly to one side as if listening to the wind. Inside, tiny prisms hung from the rafters – small, triangular pieces of glass she cut with careful, patient fingers.
Each prism held a secret.
When sunlight touched them, they did not simply reflect light. They fractured it into rivers of color that danced across the walls, bold violets, trembling golds, tender blues. They turned shadow into silk.
Children used to gather there once. They would reach out their hands and try to catch the drifting rainbows. They would press their cheeks to the warm wooden counter and beg for a story.
But children had grown up.
And grown-ups had forgotten how to seek.
One afternoon, when the sky looked especially tired, a little girl named Violet wandered into Ruth’s shop. Violet had eyes too large for her small face, as though they were still searching for something the world had misplaced.
“Why does everything look grey?” Violet asked.
Ruth studied her gently. “Because,” she said, “you are looking at it without a prism.”
Violet frowned. “What’s a prism?”
Ruth did not answer. Instead, she took Violet’s small hands in her own weathered fingers and led her outside. The sun was lowering itself into evening, its light tender and slanting.
Ruth lifted one tiny prism and held it between them and the sky.
The world broke open.
Color spilled everywhere – across Violet’s cheek, across the cobblestones, across the old baker’s window. The dull street began to dance. Even the cracks in the walls shimmered. The shadows were no longer empty; they were simply places where color was resting.
Violet gasped, not a small gasp, but the kind that opens the ribs and lets wonder rush in.
“It was always there,” Ruth whispered. “The color, the dance, the story. You just needed something to help you see.”
Word spread.
First one villager came, then another. A mother who had forgotten how to snuggle her son without checking the clock. A baker who had not laughed in years. A widower who carried his loneliness like a heavy coat even in summer.
Ruth handed each of them a small prism.
“Hold it up,” she would say. “And seek.”
They did.
And they began to marvel.
They saw how grief and joy lived side by side like shy neighbors. They saw how even their shadows were shaped by light. They saw that wrinkles on their cheeks were maps of smiles once given freely. They saw that their hands, those tired, trembling hands, were still capable of building, of holding, of reaching.
One evening, as the village glowed in fractured rainbows, Violet asked Ruth, “Why don’t you keep the biggest prism for yourself?”
Ruth smiled. “Because,” she said softly, “I do not need it anymore.”
That night, while the villagers slept under a sky that felt less distant than before, Ruth closed her shop for the last time. She left no note. Only prisms, hundreds of them, hanging in windows and doorways, catching the dawn.
In the morning, the villagers found her chair empty.
But the light was everywhere.
They gathered in the square. The baker reached for the widower’s hand. The mother knelt and snuggled her son close, her sigh no longer heavy but grateful. Violet stood in the center, her small prism held high.
The sun rose.
And the village did not look grey.
It looked alive.
Color drifted across old stones. Shadows softened. Fingers intertwined. Strangers became stories to one another. People paused long enough to let light touch their faces. They pressed their cheeks together in greeting. They listened.
And in every beam of sunlight, they could almost see Ruth’s smile, not as a memory, but as a promise.
Because a prism does not create color.
It reveals what was always there.
And perhaps that is what we are meant to be for one another in a world that sometimes forgets its own brightness – small, steady hands lifting light into broken places, helping each other seek until we marvel again.
So when the days feel heavy and the shadows grow long, hold something or someone gently between you and the light.
Watch the color return. Let it dance. Let it drift across your cheek like a blessing.
And if a tear gathers there, do not wipe it away too quickly.
It may simply be the world remembering how to shine.
© Rohini 2009–2025.
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Pieces Of My Heart 