The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

The town's veterinarian was a man with thick hands and eyes trained to judge, at a glance, how much any animal crossing his door was worth. When he saw the donkey approaching — a thin female, her coat neglected from years of wandering life, but healthy, functional, with the strong legs of one who has walked more than any domestic animal walks in its life — he felt nothing more than the ordinary interest of his trade.

When he saw what followed her, something in his expression changed completely.

The little one, even through the fever, noticed the change. He didn't understand the words that began being exchanged around him — low, urgent voices, a tone he recognized, with the same instinct he had inherited unasked from his mother, as the tone people use when they've found something they want and aren't sure how to keep it before anyone else notices first. He didn't understand the words. But he understood the way the eyes swept over him, up and down, calculating something that had nothing to do with his illness and everything to do with what his body, deformed and strange and unique, might be worth to someone willing to exhibit it, or sell it, or simply keep it as a fairground curiosity.

His mother noticed too. The little one saw how her body tensed, how her ears flattened back, how a low growl — the same warning sound that had taught him to fear danger since he was a child — began forming in her throat. But she was weak too, exhausted from two days of travel with barely any rest, and increasingly surrounded, from every direction, by people approaching with the kind of calculating curiosity no predator of the forest had ever shown them.

"That's the monster that travels with the donkey."

"We're going to be rich."

The little one didn't understand human language, but had he understood it, he would have heard exactly those words, and others like them, passing from mouth to mouth among the people beginning to surround them in a circle closing with the patient slowness of someone who knows their prey has no way left to escape. He would have heard the physical vanity of people calculating how much gold, how much fame, how much attention something as rare as him could buy them. He would have understood, long before it happened, what was about to happen.

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He didn't understand it. He only felt the circle closing, felt his mother placing herself between him and the danger with the same absolute instinct as always, felt his own body too weak to do anything but stay close to her and wait.

The arrow arrived without any warning at all.

A single movement, calculated by someone who knew exactly where to aim to immobilize without fully killing — because a dead animal wasn't worth as much gold as a live one, wounded but controllable — and his mother's body jolted with a pain the little one felt in his own, as if the fire in his own bones had suddenly spread to hers as well.

He came closer, dragging what little strength he had left, and licked her wound as best he could, without fully understanding what was happening, only understanding that something deeply wrong had occurred, that his mother — the same one who had protected him from wolves and from cold and from the absolute loneliness of being rejected by his own species — was hurt, and that he, in that moment, had no way to protect her back.

He saw the rope someone threw toward her, a thick lasso meant to immobilize, and something in his chest — the same place from which that pressure that frightened off predators had always come, the same place where he had felt, so many nights, the distant echo of that hum pursuing a father he had never known — broke in a way that had no name in any language he knew.

Why? he thought, or felt, because in that moment thinking and feeling were no longer different things. What had we done wrong? Why were we here, when she herself had taught me, my whole life, to avoid exactly this place?

He had no answer. He only had the growing weight of the circle of people closing around them, the voices calculating in a language he didn't understand how much they would be worth alive, the fever clouding his vision more and more, and his mother, wounded, trembling, still placing herself between him and the whole world with the last instinct she had left.

It was in that exact moment, with the rope halfway through the air and the arrow still trembling in his mother's body, that what this account has been building toward since its first line finally happened.