The Last Christmas On Earth

EPISODE V-3

Sometimes it happened that Harry felt hunger pangs earlier than expected and then they ate without waiting for him, but this time they had left him nothing ready to eat and it irritated him. He tried to be honest and told himself that at any other time in his life he would certainly not have made a tragedy of it, so he decided to make the best of a bad situation and tried to recover at least a shred of enthusiasm to spend a carefree hour with his son.

"Professor, I'm back!" He announced, hanging the keys on the hook next to the door. Harry was sitting on the cowhide in the center of the room, beside him was Eve and both were turned away. James realized that they were again muttering thickly in an unknown language and from the movements of their arms James thought Harry was toying with something.

"Professor, I'm back," he repeated as he reached them, but Harry kept ignoring him.

"Hey professor, I am talking to you! Today at the Scout Camp did they teach you to build earplugs?" He joked as he wondered why they were still not considering him.

Sitting on the sofa he noticed that something was moving into Harry's cupped hands, then he thought that to mitigate the sense of emptiness due to the absence of Toby they had decided to adopt a pet.

"I understand, we are all taken because we have guests, aren't we?" He said standing up, curious to find out which animal his son had chosen as his new friend. Harry interrupted his conversation with his mother and turned slightly to look at him sideways, then gave him a wicked smile as if he was concocting something. James gave no weight to that thing and approached him, meanwhile, Eve continued to draw doodles on a sheet to cover some hieroglyphics.

"Let's see, who's there?" James asked, leaning close to Harry. He turned with a lightning gesture and threw the animal at him. He saw a black shadow flying towards him and he couldn't avoid it, the beast hit him in the face and he fell heavily backward.

"Aaaah! A spider!" Harry shouted at the top of his lungs, leaping to his feet and starting to hop, pretending to be scared. "A spider, a spider," he repeated two or three times, continuing his play. James looked down and found he had a Giant Black Widow specimen squeezed on his stomach. She seemed ready to attack and he held his breath because he knew that the bite of a similar beast can sometimes be lethal. He looked up at Harry, who suddenly stopped jumping and shouting and looked at him seriously for a moment, then began to laugh like a maniac. James thought that, if he held it in his hand, the spider could not be dangerous, but he was still so terrified he couldn't move a single muscle. Suddenly Harry stopped laughing, bent over him and took the spider off and put it back in a terrarium.

"Don't worry daddy, it belongs to a non-poisonous species," he informed him, smiling amused.

"What kind of jokes are these?" James snapped, leaping to his feet, he was furious.

"I told you it's not dangerous," Harry repeated, taking the spider back from the terrarium, approached his father and tore off a paw under his very eyes. The cracking of the broken limb made James shiver, the spider reacted by immediately planting the chelicers in the palm of one hand to inject the poison, but Harry did not utterly move.

"Seen? He didn't do anything to me!" He said, and James turned purple in anger.

"You scared the hell out of me," he scolded him with all the breath he had, but instead of starting to cry like he would have done a few days before, Harry showed that he wasn't upset too much.

"You should be happy for him, he has finally overcome his arachnophobia," Eve intervened, who until then had been on the sidelines. "And then you deserved it, you know that when he's busy with something you don't have to disturb him," she added. James decided not to take up her challenge and went back to scrutinize his son, who answered him with an unreadable look. Then he was almost overwhelmed by the temptation to scream like a mad, smashing knick-knacks to vent his frustration. Instead, he emptied his lungs with a snort and fell silent, went to take back the car keys and left what, despite all his efforts, he could no longer feel like his home.

Helen had just ended the call and at first, she was petrified, her mind had refused to let the terrible news pass and had held it on the edge of her ear fearing to let her pass in, hoping instead that it would fall outside. Even if in the last few days things had seemed to flow better, in reality, the bad forebodings had not abandoned her even for an instant and the phone call she had just received was the proof that her sixth sense was not wrong. The feeling that the ground was about to collapse under her feet returned to be felt intensely and suddenly the solitude became heavy as a boulder. After all, she was simply a person and, as strong as she was, she deeply wanted someone by her side, someone sitting next to her on the sofa with whom exchange in the evening at least two words. Someone who would comfort and embraces her in silence in a similar situation. But everywhere she looked around she saw only emptiness and then an idea came on her mind unexpectedly, like a light bulb in her head. He evaluated it briefly and decided just a moment later: the very next day she would resign, throw three objects in a suitcase and leave. Where she would go and what she would do were the things that worried her less, the important thing was to find the strength to leave that place before something or someone could hold her there forever. When she felt confident enough that her decision was irrevocable, she broke the tie and decided to call James, she thought it was right to inform him because it would be him to take her place.

"Where are you?" She asked in a whisper when he answered. Meanwhile, she was already feeling terribly guilty, because she knew that leaving like that would be a real chicken s**t move.

"I just parked in your garden."

"Have you gone mad?" She exclaimed. She was convinced that whatever was the reason that brought him there, it was still a wrong reason; at that time he should have been at home with his family and nowhere else.

"You have to leave immediately," she added.

"Is it really what you truly want?" If so, I'll leave immediately, "he replied sadly after a long silence. She did not know what to answer, she only knew that she felt so alone and fragile and that she had discovered the events of those days had brought them together so much she understood that when she was away from him she felt incomplete. She wondered if by chance what they had felt for each other since they were children was not love, immediately after she regained control and wondered how her head could think such a futile thing at a time like that. James heard her breathe deeply into the phone, engaged the handbrake and waited without turning off the engine. "You haven't answered me yet," he said after waiting a little longer.

"Come to the entrance," she replied; he reached the door but found it closed. Helen was waiting for him over the closed mosquito net, while rubbing her little finger with a rough sponge, like those used for washing dishes. James narrowed his eyes, twisting his mouth because that noise was horrible, she noticed it and immediately stopped.

"Why did you call me?"

"A terrible thing happened."

"And that is?"

"It's Stevenson ..."

"What has this time that weirdo done ?"

Helen hoped that James would understand for himself because she didn't know how to tell him.

"So would you tell me what Stevie has done, please?" James became impatient.

"He has cut his veins!" Helen finally answered, and James stared at her for a long moment as if he had not understood correctly. She nodded and he leaned his forearm against the doorway, slowly lowering his head forward.

"It's not possible," he said incredulously, "he would never kill himself and above all, he wouldn't do it that way. I remember once he came to me to have a plaster put on a scratch because, despite the work he did, his own blood made too much impression to him. He was white as a rag and I thought he was going to faint ... no, Stevie couldn't have done such a thing."

"Instead, apparently that's exactly what he did," she said.

"Won't you let me enter in?" James asked her, he was tired of standing in the doorway exchanging glances through the mosquito net.

She thought about it, she wanted to let him know about her decision, but she said that maybe it wasn't the right moment.

"I think ... I don't think so," she replied in a faint voice, turning away. She knew that if she let him in, seeing him leave after half an hour to get back to Eve would hurt her too much.

"Helen, please ..." James insisted, but she shook her head looking at him haunted.

"You should be home to say goodnight to your son," she told him, but her disconsolate look suggested to James that Helen meant the exact opposite of the words she had just spoken. He decided not to force her and just listened to what her big green eyes were telling him, then he understood and nodded. Helen gave a forced smile and brought her face close to the mosquito net until she touched it with a cheek, James reached out a hesitant hand and gave her the gesture of a long, loving caress. Helen drew back her face, raised her hand and contrasted it with his own, she would have liked to cross their hands.

"Maybe if you hurry you will find him still awake," Helen told him, abruptly interrupting that magical moment.

"Maybe ..." echoed James as he kept repeating in his mind the scene of his son pulling the paw off the big spider.

After he had brilliantly passed the selections for the new job, Andy rented a small house in Tonopah, a town near the Nellis base, and before starting his new he dropped by Texas to see his parents. During his second day there he learned from television that the Rockland Lobster's Festival would take place in those days; then he had decided to fly to Maine because he had absolutely no intention of missing it. While he was finishing throwing his shirts in his suitcase, he turned on the TV and started looking for a newscast to keep him updated on the events in Rome.

"... the experts cannot understand why the subsoil still continues to tremble, this mysterious tremor makes the search and rescue of the survivors' operations even more difficult, not to mention the securing of unsafe buildings ones. Many of the residents have left central-southern Italy in search of a quieter place to stay until everything is back to normal. The few who have decided to stay due to reasons of force majeure are already almost used to it and walk staggering, like if they were drunk, as if nothing had happened there. But the most worrying thing is that the boundaries of this incomprehensible phenomenon are spreading like wildfire: apparently, the same thing is happening also in other places of the planet and people are starting to panic a little everywhere. Furthermore, it would seem that in different areas of the globe the sea is rapidly retreating; the studies carried out have given the impression that the territory is rising above sea level.

Almost as if something were swelling the earth's crust pushing it towards the high or as if the basins were rapidly emptying. And given that lately we are disclosing oddities, listen to this: apparently last night a sandstorm hit furiously the island of Rapa Nui. As everyone knows, Easter Island is dotted with Mohai, the indecipherable stone heads that make it a renowned tourist destination among fans of that genre. Well, the alleged storm produced the effect of a real blasting on the sculptures placed around the extinct volcano Rano Raraku. But the most sensational thing, you can see it from the images running behind me, is that the storm has eroded, among other things, the thin layer of dust, cemented by the centuries, that covered their eyes, revealing beneath it the presence of gigantic topazes, of the yellow-orange variety coming from Sri Lanka, set in orbital cavities. Now, many people wonder where this sandstorm could have come from, given that the island is almost 4000 miles from the nearest beach ... not to mention the distance that separates Easter Island from Sri Lanka. Who was the brave navigator who took the trouble to go to the opposite side of the planet to get the precious stones just to embellish the eyes of the Mohai?"