The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

The years passed with the stubborn slowness with which they always pass for whoever is counting them one by one, waiting for something that never quite arrives.

The little one grew until he became something no longer quite little, a body that had learned, over time, to inhabit the strange mixture of donkey and pig and something more that would never quite have a name of its own, with a clumsy but functional grace that had taken him a lifetime to develop. He learned trades the town, in its uncomfortable reverence, offered him without ever quite daring to demand them of him. He learned, even, something resembling acceptance, though never quite belonging.

But every night, without fail, he kept going down to the basement.

That particular afternoon — an afternoon that had nothing special about it beyond being, simply, one more among thousands identical to it — he came home after a long day, his body tired in the ordinary, undramatic way any body tires after working under the sun. He went down the basement stairs with the same silent ritual he had repeated every day since that first day, so many years ago now that he had stopped counting them with any precision.

The crystal was still there, exactly where his father had left it, glowing with that same soft, warm light that had never changed, not by a single degree, in all the time that had passed. He came closer, and pressed his whole body against the surface, feeling the familiar warmth filtering through the crystal as he had felt it every night of his adult life.

"Mom, I'm home," he said, quietly, in the human language he had learned over the years but that never stopped feeling a little foreign when he used it to speak to her.

She couldn't hear him, perhaps. Or perhaps she could, in some way neither the power that had put her there nor the limited science of that medieval town could fully explain. The little one — who was no longer little, who was, in every sense that mattered, an adult carrying the full weight of a childhood no one else could ever understand — would never know for certain.

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But he remembered, every time he pressed his body against that crystal, the imposing figure that had protected them when they were being hunted. He remembered that he had never felt a mother's love expressed in words, because his mother had never had the consciousness needed to form those words. And he remembered, with the same clarity as always, that it had never mattered, not once, in all the time they had spent together. She had protected him with pure instinct, had fed him with the only language she had available, had understood — he was certain of that, as certain as he was of anything else in his life — the feelings and emotions he felt, even without ever having the words to name them back.

Others had always considered her just an animal.

To him, that had made no difference from the first day and would make no difference until the last. She was the mother who had given him life. She was a being, as valid and as complete as any other that walked upon Something, with or without the consciousness the rest of the world seemed to demand as a condition for deserving love.

He stayed there, leaning against the warm crystal, in the stillness of the basement, while outside the town went on with its ordinary life, not knowing — never able to know — everything that crystal held. Not only a body suspended between life and something not quite death. It held, too, the silent, wordless proof that love needs no consciousness to be real, needs no language to sustain itself, that sometimes — the times that matter most — it shows itself exactly through what one body does for another when no one else is watching, and nothing is expected in return.

Outside, somewhere in a sky too vast for any inhabitant of that town to ever fully comprehend, a distant hum kept crossing the distance between two points that never quite managed to meet. The little one, now an adult, no longer looked up every time he heard it. He had learned, over the years, that some pursuits have no foreseeable end, and that the only honest way to live under their shadow was, simply, to keep living.

He pressed his forehead against the crystal one last time that night, and closed his eyes.

"I'm home," he repeated, even more quietly now, almost a whisper meant for no one but himself.

And somewhere inside the crystal, if such a thing were possible, something seemed to answer with the same warmth as always.