It was almost the break of dawn when Manolo reached their home. The roosters were already waking up everyone in the neighborhood, especially the farmers who were supposed to rise up early to bring their water buffaloes to the river first and give them a cold bath before plowing the fields under the scorching sun.
After he left Natalie’s house, he went back to the tree to check how much it had suffered from Sammy’s assault. He stood there, patching up the white and greenish cut on the trunk. He would pick up the chunks of the trunk on the ground and put them back in their respective places, like solving a jigsaw puzzle, but they would still fall out, so he would repeat the process: pick up the chunks and put them back on. Pick and put.
Once he had satisfied his urge to heal the trunk, as
