The Cycle of Ramón

The world had been sad for three days.

The sky wept steadily, softly, the water drip, drip, dripping from limbs and leaves of trees and eaves of houses. It trickled into rivulets and streams that whispered their way east, to the ocean.

There was only the overcast and mist and rain, but no thunder. Only the gentle pattering of drops that seemed almost to hush each other as they washed houses and fences and gardens and roads and paths. Only the cool, mute darkness.

The normally flashy lightning dared not rend the sky with so much as a single appearance. In those few rare moments when a break appeared in the clouds, the stars dimmed themselves rather than risk interrupting the young widow’s mourning.

Maria Elena leaned over the dining room table—it took up one whole end of the roomy kitchen—and gently stroked her husband’s black, wavy hair. She whispered, “Ramón. mi Ramón.” Her voice barely disturbed the air. “Tu eres mi corazón. You are my heart.”

As she had the past two nights, she dipped a soft linen cloth in a pan of hot water. She squeezed it with one hand, then washed gently over his forehead.

A matched pair of tears slipped from her cheeks and fell above his nose.

She creased the cloth to bring a fresh fold to bear, then smoothed his eyebrows from the center out. She was careful not to allow the linen to touch the tears, which had settled into the corners of his eyes and were no doubt seeping between his eyelids. “Te amo, Ramón. Mi corazón.”

She carefully creased the cloth again and washed each temple, brushing his hair over his ear on either side. As another tear slipped from her cheek to his, she dipped the cloth in the water again, squeezed it, then gently washed his cheeks.

She creased the cloth and washed both jaws, his neck and throat and chin.

Finally she dropped the linen cloth lightly into the bowl and sighed. “Le perderé para siempre, mi amor. I will miss you for a very long time.”

She stood, picked up the bowl of tepid water and looked upon her husband. He seemed to have faded a great deal since yesterday. She shook her head and moved toward the kitchen.

How she wished he could simply awaken! Among the many legends in her village, she had heard rumors of the dead awakening when the heavens openly wept for them. Especially when lightning showed respect by its absence and even the stars averted their faces. She had heard too of the dead living again when the tears of a loved one settled into the spirit path of their eyes.

But no. Ramón was gone.

She dabbed lightly at her own eyes. At least she’d had a chance to say goodbye.

A knock sounded lightly on the door.

Maria Elena set the bowl, cloth and all, on the kitchen counter alongside the sink and went to answer the knock.

When she opened the door, her mother, Federica, and her mother’s sister, Juana, peered at her from beneath Federica’s umbrella. Their faces were balanced on an eerie cusp between the shadows of the night and the flickering glow emanating from the fireplace.

Maria Elena bowed her head and gestured. “Please, come inside.”

Pushing Juana ahead of her, Federica closed her umbrella, then entered and enveloped her daughter in a warm but restrictive hug.

Rainwater from the umbrella dripped on the saltillo tiles, discoloring the mortar between them. Federica said, “We have been so worried about you, Maria! Are you all right?”

“I am fine, Mamá.” She shrugged away from her mother’s arms and hugged Juana lightly to get it over with.

Juana’s brow furrowed. “Are you sure you are okay, Mija? Not a word in three days.”

Her mother sighed and shook her head. “Nothing is going so well these days, eh?”

“Nothing has gone well for a very long time, Mamá. But it is—”

Her mother brushed past her, followed closely by Juana. Federica removed her coat as she bustled into the kitchen. “Oh, how I have missed this kitchen!” She flopped her coat over the back of a chair and laid her umbrella on the table right between Ramón’s legs. “Is there coffee?”

Maria blanched, retrieved the umbrella and hung it on a peg on the wall. “Of course there is coffee, Mamá.” She took a mug from the cabinet over the sink and turned to the stove.

Just as she turned back with the coffee, Juana flopped her coat across the table, effectively covering Ramón’s lower abdomen.

Maria Elena screeched as the hot coffee sloshed from the cup and scalded a rivulet across the back of her hand. An instant later the cup shattered on the floor.

In the next instant she had covered the distance to the table. “I am so sorry, Mamá. I will get you another cup in a moment.”

She grabbed Juana’s coat and flung it over the back of a chair, then returned to the stove. Her legs had gone weak and her voice had assumed a trembling quality. “Perhaps—perhaps we should take our coffee into the living room?”

She poured a cup and turned to the women, then handed the mug to her mother. Regaining her composure a bit, she said, “Y mi tia Juana, would you care for a cup?” 

The two women looked at her oddly for a long moment, as if she were an evil twin of herself.

For a moment, the only sound was the cruel, popping, staccato laughter from the fireplace in the next room.

Her mother set her cup on the table, nearer Ramón’s left ankle than his right, then reached to caress her daughter’s arm. “We worry, Mija. It is that time of year again.” Just as quickly she pulled her hands back to herself and bit her lip. In a very quiet voice, she said, “He is gone, Mija. You know he is gone, yes?”

Tears brimming in her eyes, Maria Elena nodded. “Si, Mamá. And everything will be all right. What cannot be remedied must be—”

Her mother caressed her arm. “Yes, yes. That is the truth of things.”

Her Aunt Juana caressed the other. “Remember, todo es posible con Dios, Maria. With God, all things are possible.”

“Yes, yes. Everything will be all right.” She retrieved her mother’s and Juana’s coats from the back of the chairs, and the umbrella from the pegs. She held the coats and the umbrella toward the women. “For now, though—for tonight—I must complete my private mourning.”

Her mother took her coat and sighed. “Yes. Yes, of course you must decide for yourself what is proper and right.” She hugged Maria and looked closely at her daughter’s face. “We will see you soon, then?”

Maria wiped a tear from her cheek. It was the only one she had allowed to escape in her mother’s presence in over five years. “I will see you soon.”

She saw them to the front door and closed it gently behind them. Then she turned the latch and returned to the dining room table.

She pulled out a chair, sat, and lay her head on her husband’s shoulder. “Ramón. Mi Ramón. Mi corazón. Regrese por favor. Please come back to me.”

But she knew that wouldn’t happen.

As sobs wracked her body, she thought back to the evening she had first known the love of her life.

* * *

Long before her parents had begun encouraging her to find a man of her own and to marry and have children, she and Ramón had run down to the sea almost every day after their lessons.

The son of a stone mason, Ramón took most of his lessons at his home very near the center of the village. The rest he took from his next door neighbor, a priest who was teaching him to write in two languages.

Maria Elena took her lessons, primarily in sewing and cooking and the tending of a home, in her parents’ house. The house was situated just above the beach, as necessitated by her father’s station. He was a somewhat successful fisherman, at least much of the time.

Because of the location of their houses in relation to the sea, most often Ramón would come to get her, though it seldom seemed like that. A very physical boy, he would run from his house all the way to the beach, the better part of three kilometers.

But as he approached her little stone and mud house, he would slow his pace.

It was their secret, their way of him picking her up without making a fuss over the whole thing. A fuss might involve parents and friends and other outsiders. He knew he belonged with her, and she knew she belonged with him. What anyone else knew or did not know was of no consequence.

Over all those years, from the time he was six and she was five until he was fifteen and she was fourteen, most days found her waiting for him in the front yard. She perched on the stone fence “like a little bird,” her father said. Then he waved as he headed off to the cantina to relax from his arduous day.

Inside the house, her mother fingered her rosary. Her fingers moved nimbly from one bead to the next as she mumbled quietly in the dark corner near the fireplace.

Then Ramón would come over the hill from town and veer east-northeast to pass by her house. That whole time he seemed suspended in time. He was a beautiful physical specimen.

His bronzed arms and legs pumped as if in slow motion. The muscles of those limbs tensed, but the limbs themselves seemed almost to hang in midair. When he slowed to such an amazing degree it invoked a kind of sadness in her. Almost as if it were a great, raw omen.

Then a grin would spring across her face. She would launch herself from her perch and catch up with him. And they whisked away together, laughing madly, covering the final 200 meters at full speed. Secretly, she had ardently suspected they covered that remaining distance at very near light speed.

At the beach, they ran into the sea and swam. They laughed and explored. Back on the beach, they built sand castles.

And neither could imagine that anything sinister would ever enter their lives. 

*

Maria awoke, looked at her beautiful Ramón.

He was growing more pale, as if fading.

She caressed his hair. “Do you remember, Ramón, when Francisco called me Cara Pequeña de Puerco? Little Pig Face?” She smiled. “You defended my honor well, my love. It was the first time you declared by your actions that I belonged to you and no other.”

She caressed his hair again. “I think I will never forget the look on Francisco’s face when he stepped back and apologized.”

* * *

Francisco was an apprentice stone mason. He was in training with Ramón’s father.

As Ramón was sweeping up the leavings of the day, the boy grinned mischievously. “You spend much time with Maria Elena de Cordoba. Perhaps someday you will marry her. Then you will no longer have to perform the woman’s work.”

Bent to the task at hand, Ramón didn’t realize the comment was intended as an insult. He shrugged. “I spend much time with many people. Maria is my friend. I work for my father. I do the tasks assigned to all apprentices. They are the same tasks you performed until a year ago.”

He looked up. “Besides, there is no woman’s work or man’s work. There is only work.”

Francisco sneered. “Still, it would be better to have Cara Pequeña de Puerco doing the sweeping and the sewing and cooking, would it not? And perhaps other things too, eh?”

The handle of Ramón’s broom slapped the floor. He balled up his fists and advanced on Francisco. “What did you say?”  

Ramón’s father came in. “I heard what was said. You both will come with me.”

The boys followed him out through the door and down the street to the village rectory. Ramón’s father paused and knocked on the door.

The priest, Father Pablo, opened the door. He listened as Ramón’s father conveyed the earlier conversation. Then he looked at Francisco. “Do you wish to apologize for having insulted the honor of young Ramón’s friend?”

Francisco vehemently shook his head.

The priest looked at Ramón and shrugged. “Surely you do not wish to fight him, so—”

Ramón’s gaze never left Francisco’s face. “Oh pero sí, Padre. I do wish to fight him. Very much.”

Ramón’s father tried to intercede. “But he is older than you, Ramón. He is larger and stronger.”

Ramón shook his head. Quietly he said, “He is not stronger, Papa. He is merely more brash. I will fight him. And I will beat him.”

Ten minutes later Ramón, thirteen, and Francisco, fifteen, were set to do battle in the street outside the rectory.

A small crowd began to gather. The village seldom saw such excitement in the late afternoon.

Indeed, it was late enough and the rumors loud enough that Maria had left her perch and wandered into town to find her tardy friend. The crowd attracted her. But once she recognized the boys in the circle, she faded back and remained mostly out of sight near the corner of the rectory.

Father Pablo made a show of announcing the reason for the dispute. The fact that young Ramón was willing to fight an older, much larger boy to defend the honor of his friend—his girl friend—was not lost on the females in the crowd.

The padre instructed the boys in the rules of the contest. “There will be no kicking or clawing, do you understand? No biting, and no gouging of the eyes. There also will be no—”

Francisco interrupted the priest with the first punch, a hard blow that caught Ramón on the left cheekbone. The punch snapped his head to the right. It also glanced off his nose just enough to cause a trickle of blood.

Ramón grinned broadly, partly to show off for the girls among the small crowd circling around him and Francisco. But mostly he grinned with pleasure. He sensed the punch was Francisco’s best shot, and it had only barely stung him.

The priest stepped back in awe, his mouth open. “Francisco! It was not time to begin! It was not time! You should not have—”

Never taking his gaze from Francisco, Ramón raised one hand and the priest stopped.

Ramón glared at Francisco, blood trickling over the slight smile that was still on his lips. Then he motioned his enemy forward with a cocked index finger.

His eyes set in slits, Francisco approached him.

The priest advanced as well, ready to intervene if necessary.

Blood streaming from his nose, Ramón stuck his face close to Francisco’s left ear. His smile tempered his whispered words. “You cannot hurt me, and you know it. Now you will step back. You will apologize aloud to Maria Elena de Cordoba—who is my woman—or you and I will finish this. And Panchito, I promise: I will hurt you.”

The priest overheard. He stepped back quickly, barely able to contain a smile. 

A red spot from Ramón’s dripping nose soaked through Francisco’s white linen shirt at the shoulder.

A sea breeze swept up the hill from the ocean, but even as the sweat cooled Francisco’s brow, the spot on his shoulder grew warmer, almost hot.

Almost imperceptibly, he nodded, his gaze locked with Ramón’s. Then he stepped back.

He tested Ramón’s eyes, but he found only stone-solid resolve. He bowed his head for a long moment. When he looked up, he spoke quietly but loudly enough for everyone in the circle to hear. “My sincere apologies, Ramón. I am sorry I made such a crude comment concerning señorita Maria Elena de Cordoba. It was foolish of me.” A slightly sarcastic tone crept into his voice, and his fists tightened at his sides. “I did not understand that she was—su cariñosita.”

Ramón nodded, the hint of a smile still on his lips.

Francisco bowed again, low, then righted himself. “And I am in your service.”

He took another step backward, then spun on his heel and walked off down the road.

He did not show up for his apprenticeship the next morning.

Nobody in the village ever saw him again.

* * *

At the table in her kitchen, Maria stroked Ramón’s hair again, noting that she could barely feel it. “You were my strong, handsome defender, Ramón. You were and are the love of my life, and it shall ever be so.”

* * *

On the sixteenth anniversary of Ramón’s birth, at the end of the workday, his father greeted him with a broad smile. “Today, my son, you are a stone mason. I can teach you nothing more. You have learned to speak and write English as well, so you can choose which life to live and where to live it. I hope you will remain in the village or at least nearby, but the world is at your feet. I am proud of you.”

Ramón embraced his father. “Gracias, Papa!” He stepped back, but he could hardly contain his grin. “You will excuse me, sir? I should probably—”

His father shook his head and burst into laughter, gesturing toward the door. “Go, my son, and be swift! She is waiting, probably perched on the fence as usual.”

Ramón raced along the path to the east just as he did on most days. But this day was different.

He grinned broadly.

This day he would stop short of the sea.

This day he would ask señor Cordoba’s permission to court his daughter. Then, in one year, after he had proven to her parents that he was worthy of her, he would ask for Maria Elena’s hand in marriage.

Of course, her father would give his assent and her mother would be ecstatic to have a stone mason in the family. There would be an engagement party. They would be married a year after that in the grandest wedding the village had ever seen.

He leapt for joy and redoubled his pace.

As he came over the edge of the hill and cut east-northeast from the trail, he did not slow down as usual. If anything, he sped up.

He wanted to get to her, tell her he was a stone mason.

He wanted to pick her up and swing her in the air.

More than anything, he wanted to talk with her father, her mother. Then, if there was still time and if it was still proper, they would go down to the sea together.

* * *

Maria Elena was sitting on the fence, a wide grin on her face. She knew. She was waiting.

But an unearthly sound brought the beginning of realization. It was a sharp, loud, flat crack, like the strongest, most surprising bolt of lightning.

She frowned, then leaned to leap from the fence. Her eyes were stretched wide, her mouth trapped open in a soundless scream that might never end.

Ramón slowed down—as usual—but not as usual.

He and Maria Elena hung in mid-air, trapped together in an moment of horror, separated by eternity.

She strained to reach the ground with her feet.

She had to run to him.

She had to wrap him up, protect him.

And at the end of the sharp, flat crack that ripped the air apart, a red-pink cloud appeared next to his head.

As her feet touched the ground, Ramón pitched forward to the earth

He would never move again. 

* * *

Her father died two years later of a liver affliction. When that happened, her mother moved to the other side of the village to live with her sister.

Maria chose to remain in the stone house near the sea.

There, over time, she developed a habit of going down to the sea. Always after dark, so nobody could see,

She would walk along the shore with Ramón, his hand on her waist, her head on his shoulder, and they would swim.

She knew he wasn’t really there, but she kept hoping he would be.

She prayed each night that he would show up.

He would gather her in his loving arms and pull her into the sea. There they would reside together forever.

Such is the way of love that has lasted over many lifetimes.

* * *

Finally, five years to the day after Ramón was murdered, it happened.

The sea beckoned, more strongly than usual.

Maria Elena ran to the shore, stopped and peered into the darkness. She was alone, but if others had come along she would not have noticed.

Tonight there was something different. Tonight there was something more.

A great deal more.

She trembled, not with fear but with nerves. Something she had never done when anticipating an evening with the sea.

She pulled her blouse over her head and dropped it on the sand. She stepped out of her flowing skirt, her underwear, her sandals.

She waded out from the shore, and she closed her eyes and dove beneath the waves. Gracefully, she swam, her hands smoothly slicing through the water as if caressing its heart.

Where she sensed the water was getting deeper, she stood again. She peered out into the gentle waves, her arms slightly above her head, as if in surrender.

She would surrender to the sea. It was such a beautiful place, a living entity. Ships had sunk there, and airplanes. Lovers had drowned there. It was alive with wild creatures as well, but also with beings from above.

Countless times she had seen the small fireballs in the sky, arcing perfectly toward the sea. Sometimes, she imagined she heard Ramón laughing. No doubt with pure, heavenly ecstasy, for certainly he was an angel now.

On those nights when she heard his laughter, she rushed to the shoreline and dove in quickly, immersing herself in the elation carried in the joyful waves. She could swim for hours on those nights. And when she finally left the water on those nights, she did so with a heart made lighter with joy. Often she smiled for the next few days.

At other times she heard heart-wrenching sobs. She imagined a few immortals had chosen to drown their sorrows in the sea.

On those nights, she knew Ramón was busy caring for his fellow angels. And on those nights she did not swim. She did not want to interrupt her love in his important work, and she would not risk being overcome with celestial sadness. Her human mind and emotions would not be able to handle it.

In her small village, one legend held that an angel, a very old man with enormous wings, had fallen from the sky. It had ventured into a family garden to molt and rest and renew itself.

Surely if one angel had fallen into her village, many more had fallen into countless other towns and cities and nations. And how many more must have fallen into the vastness of the sea? They and the other creatures, in concert with the rhythms of the universe and the phases of Luna, had imbued the sea with true life. They provided its own throbbing heartbeat, its own gentle rhythms.

She felt most natural when surrounded by the sea’s swirling, watery tendrils. When receiving its loving caresses.

And tonight would be special. She knew it.

A realization hit her: Tonight was the night. Tonight Ramón was coming home to her.

She waded deeper, her feet alternately touching sand, then giving way to weightlessness.

This is how mi Ramón must feel all the time: flowing, weightless, everywhere at once.

The waves rolled in gently, one after another after another. Each was soothingly warm, kissing her cheeks and chin. Each massaged her shoulders and throat, flicking around her small, buoyant breasts.

Beneath the surface, the undercurrents paid homage, caressing her ankles and calves, swirling about her thighs and hips, stroking and circling her abdomen and waist.

Her eyes closed, Maria Elena sighed. Never had she felt such remarkably gentle yet electrifying sensations.

With something akin to reverence, she rested her arms on the surface. She reached to embrace her lover. “Venga a mi, mi amor. Come to me.”

The currents swelled and warmed. They swirled more strongly, more firmly in their intensity. Their heat embraced her, enveloped her, penetrated her.

She half-opened her eyes for only a moment, then closed them again and lay back.

Her lips curled into a soft smile as the sea’s rhythms washed over her, kissing her forehead, her eyelids, caressing her ears and throat and lips. It caressed her shoulders and arms, her back and abdomen, her hips and thighs and calves and feet. It bathed her, worshiped her, loved her.

Her passion matched that of the undulating, untamed sea. It surged and swelled and heaved around her, into her, through her, caressing, twirling, swirling, writhing, undulating, whitecaps frothing. Her breath quickened into gasps as her great lover finally, finally, finally began to ebb.

Three hours after she had ventured into the surf, she slept, one with Ramón. She remained completely at peace as he lifted her, carried her to the shore.

He lay her gently next to her clothing, brushed a strand of hair from across her eyelids.

And faded back into the sea.

* * *

She awoke a few hours later, her heart filled, her mind and body satisfied.

She looked at the sky, the few wispy clouds. They were so thin that their passing only dimmed the stars, and only momentarily. She’d had enjoyed an amazing dream, one in which every fiber of her being had been inundated, permeated, saturated with pure love.

And Ramón had been there.

She had been filled with light, every cell transformed into something better than it had ever been before.

Finally she sat up, pulled her knees to her chest, and clasped her hands in front of them. She looked at the beautiful sea, sparkling beneath the full light of Luna.

Softly she said, “And he loves me so much, he caused me to sleep.”

That had never happened before.

She tried on a frown, but it wouldn’t stay. She tried to feel sad that she had slept so long, but there was no sense of loss or sadness at parting.

“Because he is with me. He is still here. He is still here.”

She remembered how he used to wade just offshore, then plop down, immersing himself completely, yet still within reach, and it dawned on her. “That is what he has done this time! He is right here! He is right here!”

Unbridled joy emanated from her very core.

The sky beyond the edge of the sea began to grow light. “Oh no. No. I must hurry.” It might be the last chance she would have to say a proper goodbye to her love.

She put on her panties and sandals, then swept up her skirt and blouse. She waded into the surf.

A warmth caressed her legs. “Here.” She smiled. “He is right here.”

She stooped and soaked Ramón into her skirt and blouse. When she was sure she had all of him, she waded out of the surf and walked back up the path to her small stone house.

Just as the sun peeked over the horizon, she closed the door.

* * *

She kicked off her sandals and carried Ramón to the dining room table.

She released him from her blouse and skirt, then tossed those over the back of a chair and turned back to him.

He was so handsome lying there.

She leaned over the dining room table, which took up one whole end of the roomy kitchen, and gently stroked her husband’s black, wavy hair. She whispered, “Ramón. Mi Ramón.” Her voice barely disturbed the air. “Tu eres mi corazón.”

* * *

And as intricately connected as they were, Ramón himself became aware of a certain reduction. There was a letting go, followed by an ebbing of himself and the tides in his cells.

There was a wafting away of the need for sensory stimuli. Then the rapid distancing of the stimuli itself.

His hearing and his eyesight did not fade as he had always thought they would.

Instead, those things to which he tried to listen or upon which he tried to focus quickly withdrew. They receded to mere pinpoints of sound and light as quickly as one might snap a finger.

Still, he seemed able to sense their digression from here to there through their quantum trick.

Simultaneous with the reduction, Ramón experienced a kind of draining, a funneling from something into nothing. Perhaps it was to make Nothing more full. Or perhaps more empty.

Even as he drained and even as he became the flow that accompanies being drained, a numbing, half-hearted deadness washed over him. A throbbing, pulsing, liquid gravity pinned him and his numbness to a dark, stark, undulating mass.

At almost the same time, the despondent grief of she who was letting go washed through him in a series of waves. They were gentle as the caress of a loving hand. The undulations were almost physical, and he welcomed them. He absorbed them, taking them into himself and far away from her. She did not deserve the grief.

Each wave began at the center of his forehead, smoothing out and down, out and down, out and down. Each wave descended over his eyelids, over and around his nose and eyes, down over his cheeks.

Each wave lingered for an extra beat at his lips, as if encountering a breakwater and mournfully regretting the need to surmount it. Then it slipped remorsefully down over his chin, throat and torso. Each wave continued through each limb and out through the tips of his fingers and toes.

Of all the waves, the first was by far the strongest. And although each followed the same pattern, each washed through him with less intensity than the one before, merging him more fluidly into the liquid gravity that had been above and the undulating mass that had been below.

Even as the waves washed through his body, one after another after another, tendrils from the first wave rose through his brain, probing, touching off electrical impulses. It was a grand finale to his personal fireworks show. Synapses fired in sequence, dozens setting off hundreds setting off thousands.

Through a misty fog he flashed from a dark red warmth through light to crib slats and saltillo tile floors to jeans with a rope belt and friends and laughter and a wayward cursing of a coward with a gun and a brilliant, screaming-red instant and—!

Synapses fired, thousands setting off millions setting off billions.

He must have glowed like a shooting star as he plunged from the heavens into the undulating mass of the womb.

The waves ebbed, dwindled to ripples. And just as he and the gravity and the undulations fully blended, the ripples lessened, lessened and blinked out of existence.

The mist dissipated, and the mass he had become rose and fell, swelled and ebbed.

Something in his blood began to mix with his need, and he began to seep. He began to dissolve, to reconstitute in drops that slipped through the slats in the table and off the edges, then reunited beneath.

He—the first bit of him—ran along the slats and dripped to the floor even as the next bits above were dissolving, slipping through slats, dripping to the floor and forming a rivulet to the drain in the back wall.

In a few hours he was in front of the garden. He was stretched around the corner to the shed, and from there back through the drain to where the last of him had dripped from the table and was seeping across the floor.

And from the old, tired garden gate that he had meant to fix soon after the honeymoon, from there back around almost to the shed, the water from the sky dripped from limbs and leaves of trees and eaves of houses and trickled into rivulets and streams.

There it was, the rainwater and Ramón, and together it whispered its way west, to the ocean.

The overcast and mist continued for his protection. But the lightning, no longer able to contain its joy at his reunion with all that is, flashed across the sky in bright smiles.

The thunder applauded his return to the sea and from there to the heavens.

And from there, someday, to another womb.

The stars burst like supernovae, celebrating.

And sure enough, by daybreak, even the young widow, Maria Elena de Cordoba, had stopped mourning.

She couldn't remember a time when she hadn’t been alone, and she couldn’t remember ever being happier.

* * * * * * *

About the Author

Harvey Stanbrough was born in New Mexico, seasoned in Texas and baked in Arizona. For a time, he wrote under five personas and several pseudonyms, but he takes a pill for that now and writes only under his own name. Mostly.

Harvey is an award-winning writer who follows Heinlein’s Rules avidly. He has written and published over 75 novels, 9 novellas, and over 230 short stories. He has also written 16 nonfiction books on writing. and he’s compiled and published 30 collections of short fiction and 5 critically acclaimed poetry collections.

To see his other works, please visit HarveyStanbrough.com.

For his best advice on writing, see his Daily Journal at HEStanbrough.com.