All the Angels

Mr. Zellaby returned home an hour later. We found him standing alone, under the wide countryside sky and the cold nocturnal breeze. He hadn't wait for me to pick him up after the lecture, but decided to walk miles from the Grange instead. He was back, yet something had altered his mood. In the nine years I've known this man he had not changed a bit and, suddenly, he seemed eons older. Weary from the ancient burden of survival and the impossibility of leading a peaceful life after his quest. Anthea ran to the door and hugged him. Only some minutes earlier, she was convinced that she should never see her husband again.

"Richard," said Zellaby in a low voice, reflective, but without his usual intrigue. "Thank you for staying with my wife... I hope that... from now on, this town will suffer of unearthly problems no more."

While I tried to make sense of his words, Anthea stared at him eyes wide opened, concerned by this message.

"Oh, Gordon!" claimed his wife. "What have you done?"

Then, my eyes felt heavy. I couldn't look straight at anything but the floor. Pain paralyzed my body and slowly weighted over my heart. I grew aware of tears blurring my view as I remembered the children crowding the steps of the Grange to welcome their teacher. All of them smiling and ready to attend today's lesson, waiting for the wonderful stories about distant lands that Mr. Zellaby brought them in the simplicity of videotape reels and a small projector. I had seen them as they really were, children with a small "c". And now their image appeared in my mind clearer than ever. Clearer than in those accidental occasions when I had passed them by on the road, impressed by their foreign beauty, yet only daring to glance for a moment. Those frightening Children, dangerous and impossible to predict, yet children after all. I could imagine them sitting behind their desks, waiting for the movie to begin as they enjoyed their candy

...the candy.

Slowly, I turned back to Zellaby and noticed the circles under his eyes had turned darker. His stare was that of a hopeless man, one who knows himself lost and can only accept the end in silence. Before him was a life which would feel longer than the actual time he had to spare. And so, damned to the bone, Zellaby stood weak and tired as black remorse ran through his veins. For a second, the vision was clear, as if I'd witnessed the fatal scene myself. Thirty boys, twenty-eight girls, turning blue one by one, or turning grey or purple, or whichever color was in their nature when contaminated. Sick bodies, coughing and crawling in pain. Sixty corpses piled together, waiting for the military to take them away. Waiting to arrive at their labs, to be opened and dissected, to be dumped in a hole on the ground. Far from everything they knew, far from dreams of conquest and travel, and far from human mothers who loved them as their own. Wating 'till morning, to be burnt with the trash. 

This is the true face of extermination, of brutal and instinctive survival. A final relief to the stress. Desperation leading to no other option than that which seems definite, but heartless. Equivalent masks of humanity, empathy and merciless death turn, shinning as they become one, like flipping a coin in the air. But what peace could the constricted heats in this town find after such slaughter?

I stared into my neighbor's eyes and witnessed a memory. I could feel the warmth of sixty identical faces smiling, for the first time, from what seemed like a heart.

"The children..." said Mr. Zellaby. "I poisoned the children."