The End of Days
The children, possessed with their survival and rabid with betrayal, covered themselves in the blood of the complicit elders and disappeared into the woods.
Quiet as he kept it, his decision to live haunted every second of his interminable existence. He did not know why he chose to stay. Fury and resentment rendered the reason diffuse and incomprehensible. He entrusted his inability to understand to the only lesson he learned as a child. His mind’s refusal to reveal the root, stem and blossom of his desire to live was, in fact, a debt finally repaid. He had earned a way to protect what could be plucked, even if it meant he wandered his life as a spectre, pulsating with rage, haunting himself with his questions.
His reason for living was obscured until the very moment his decision to live was taken from him. Only then, as his life evacuated its prison, did the mist of his decision solidify. He saw for the first time since it happened the single white lily bursting forth from the soil in that abandoned garden on the edges of that godforsaken town. He remembered his promise to himself, called forth from the deepest depths of his spirit during this moment that would calcify in his mind and against his will.
He left behind questions that people wanted to forget he asked, a house ransacked by shame and, tucked away in the top corner of the side of the bed he no longer rolled onto, the picture of the man he had loved and for whom the scent and promise of lilies were an albatross. His life should have only been what it always was: scarred through with the casual and unjustified cruelty of the world. What nobody could know was that in the very spot his fertile blood was spilled on that unremarkable evening in June, white lilies would begin to bloom in their hundreds.
It would be there that another boy would fight back with a contagious rage that perfumed the homes and hearts of every child in that sleepy and silent backwater. The children, possessed with their survival and rabid with betrayal, would cover themselves in the blood of the complicit, set alight what was left of the pretences and disappear into the woods. And from those woods, their terrific and terrifying war cries would puncture and poison the silence of quiet nights. From those woods, and in defiance of every attempt at their capture, postcards with finger paintings of lilies would arrive in surrounding towns with little packets of seeds taped on the back.
It would be these seeds, harvested from the blood of their kin, that would foment and fragrance the uprising that would portend the end of a society erected on the violation of its children.