The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

The town, in the weeks that followed, would tell the story of that day in its own way, the only way people know how to tell things they don't fully understand: turning it into a manageable myth.

They spoke of the righteous wrath that had fallen upon those who had dared raise weapons against an innocent child. They spoke, with time and the natural exaggeration every story acquires as it passes from mouth to mouth, of how the dead that day had not been victims but the guilty, greedy men who had tried to capture and sell the son of the messiah that the whole world, according to the oldest stories now resurfacing with renewed force, had created to save it. The town celebrated, in its own twisted way, the death of the "wretches" who had dared touch what belonged to a force so far above them that it wasn't even worth imagining its true face.

No one, in those celebrations, stopped to think about the donkey frozen in a basement on the outskirts of town, nor about the sick child who had accompanied her there, nor about the plain, unadorned fact that everything that had happened that day had not been the divine punishment of a distant, satisfied god, but the desperate reaction of a father who had spent years fleeing, exclusively, to keep alive the family he now, finally, had to abandon again.

Stolen novel; please report.

The little one heard none of those stories the town began telling itself. By the time people began speaking of messiahs and divine justice, he had already moved away from the center of town, guided by an instinct that needed no human words to understand one thing with total clarity: he had to find where his mother's body had been left.

He found her in the basement of the veterinarian's house, the only structure left standing, almost intact, amid the chaos his father had left behind. The crystal enveloping her glowed with a soft, almost warm light, one that completely contradicted the cold one would expect from something called "frozen." He approached, pressed his small body against the transparent surface, and felt, through the crystal, something he could swear was the same warmth as always, the same slow and constant heartbeat he had known every night of his life sleeping against his mother's side.

He didn't cry, that first time, though he had every reason in the world to. He simply stayed, leaning against the crystal, feeling the impossible warmth coming from within, understanding, without needing anyone to explain it to him, that his mother was not dead. She was waiting. And he, meanwhile, would have to learn to live a completely new kind of life, without her walking beside him, but also without having lost her entirely.