The Child, The Man and…
Warning: this short oneshot was originally written in Italian. It was translated automatically and quickly refined.
#RushIn
In his mind it was Spring. The ice that hurt those lands had melted away and had become nourishment for the thirsty earth, for the big tree on the hill: the Oak, with its black twisted trunk, sank its gnarled roots into the bowels of the soil, splitting the memory up to the abyss of the unconscious – where, silently, the shadows quivered. The man was standing there, one hand touching the bark battered by the years, his gaze running away. For once his eyes were calm. Before him the blue horizon shimmered, trembling with expectation; and finally, as the wind rose to whisper through the untouched grass, he appeared. The child had a slender figure and steps so delicate that he didn't damage a single stem, not even when he ran towards the tree, towards the man who was waiting for him with a fragile smile on his face. The kid threw himself into his strong arms and abandoned himself to them without any fear: he cried, they both cried in childish broken sobs, hugging each other for the first time in their entire lives. As they slid down to sit in the shade of the deciduous tree, the child snuggled up against the adult's warm chest, against his tear-drenched shirt; Kastor ran a hand through his soft curls, a repetitive and comforting gesture, able to soothe the last traces of tears. Opening his eyes again – familiar brown eyes, watery and innocent – the boy asked a single question. “How could you do this to me?” That thin voice shook every fiber in Kastor's heart: he had to exhale a broken breath, mirroring himself for an instant in the child's heartbroken gaze. “Forgive me,” he replied. He wiped his tears with one hand and spoke again, for he was now a man, and a man knows how to apologize. «I was drowning in pain, in mine and in yours, I was… desperate». It was at that point that his tone became firmer, that his eyes stared resolutely in those, identical, of the child: “I'll never let that happen again.” And in pronouncing these words he strengthened his grip on the youngest's small hands. The boy bowed his head and nodded gravely. He knew that there, at the core of their souls, only the truth could be spoken. They were silent for long, slow moments, content with each other's presence. Never would they have thought that the painful rift between them could be bridged. When the silence was broken again, it was by the boy himself, whose voice was now hoarse and pained. “It'll never quite go away, will it?” That bitter truth led the two to look to the West, where the slope descended steeply, crumbling and cracking until it ended in a wall of strong gnarled roots: they had emerged only in recent years, strengthening the hill to prevent landslides, and still now they continued to grow – slow, methodical, steady. Beyond the bank flowed a river black as oil, its waters unruffled and exuding a poisonous cold. Feeling that, somewhere deep inside his soul, in a buried and locked cell, the echo of those icy currents still attracted him like a magnet, Kastor confessed in a breath what everyone already knew. “I am sorry. He will stay with us until our last breath.” The youngest, the child, clung even closer to the adult and narrowed his frightened eyes. “I wish you could just send him away.” “I would like it too. We all want it,” the man replied bitterly, his eyes growing distant. “But now, now I'm not even so sure I hate him any more than I pity him.” His (their) blurred Sight had darted forward, over the bank, skimming swiftly over the colorless water. «He knows the pain of these lands,» the mind's eye, pulsing with those words, soared in the air for a heartbeat, mirrored in the placid darkness; then – without even a tremor – it plunged to cut through the black water. “And he’s all we've done wrong,” Kastor continued, his voice flattened by unbearable pressure as his Sight slid down, down, deep into the Abyss, dodging bits of floating memory and sharp shards of muffled suffering, so deep into the Unconscious he was forced to cling ferociously to his own little reasoning; “yet I know that like me, like you, he too is marked.” The Sight braked a step from the bottom. In the liquid darkness they perceived all around them the shapes of phantom wrecks: old, old memories. They had always rotted there, doomed to crumble into dust, polluting and choking the river with their fine dross. There were also chains. They floated listlessly, moved by invisible currents; they anchored down black limbs, indistinguishable from the silt that enveloped everything. Only two sleepy eyes, reduced to white slits and narrowed, answered Kastor's gaze. “He too wants the suffering to end.” The logs made no noise as the figure moved slightly, leaning towards where he felt he was being watched. Kastor let no fear show. “You don’t have to be afraid anymore.” In less than an instant their consciousness projected upwards and the thin captive shape disappeared in the distance; the surface of the water shattered silently and Kastor, opening his eyes again in the light, breathed the spring’s air. The man embraced the child, holding him close. “I have it under control”.
