eternal

There was no sound from the alarm. He didn´t hear the sirens far away as usual. No spotlights aiming at a sky as black as the present world was breathing now.
He lived in a London suburb with his mother wainting day after day for a mailman who would leave him more of an orphan.
The war had started some time before, and Timmy took refuge in his dreams and not under the table. He was 12 years old, and the things he had lived through made him understand, by force, that the solution to the problems of human beings were not found with death, but with quite the contrary.
The dining-room was intact, from the time it was filled with laughter, and he was there, thinking about stories that made him forget his own.
His neighbourhood had never been bombed but an explosion on the roof left him petrified, bathed in wood and dust, standing, before a bomb with the colour of wind, that a German pilot on an ill aimed flight, dropped where he could.
The small china horse which kept the books in place, neighed in terror.
The world stopped. The bomb remained suspended in mid air, and Timmy knew everythin g was finished. Listless within an eternal pause, he gazed at the walls, with the plates trembling without movement, looking through the light freckled with plaster and splinters of wood. The brown wall paper was the stage prop of a terrible scene which nobody could reproduce. Not even the one who had tried for Guernica. The immensity of the silence resembled the uncertainty with which the boy was trying to see death from behind a chair. Was this death? An eternal instant before desintegrating together with his dreams? Timmy couldn’t cry. All questions came to a stop, for no answers came to meet them. His gaze took flight through the great hole in the roof showing a star lit sky. The shining metal and the rays of shadows seemed beautiful to him when a feeling of peace took hold of him, and time followed its course.



Eterno está también en español acá al lado en los links de PURO CUENTO.

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