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MIRA

The wind was a beast determined to invade the small house Dan had constructed about eight years ago on the shores of a remote mountain lake. Finding the spot with all the materials he would need readily available within nature was pure serendipity. It was also exactly what Dan had craved for after he had lost his entire family in one fell, fateful blow.

The storm shook the cabin like a dog thrashing around with a toy.

“I guess I’ll know soon enough if my carpentry skills were adequate enough,” Dan mused to himself. Then he suddenly leaned forward in his wicker chair, for he thought he had heard a knock at his door.

“What the?” he said when he once again very distinctly heard determined hammering. “Who would be out here at this time of the evening?”

That wasn’t truly his concern though. What sped through Dan’s mind was the question of who had managed to find him in this isolated spot. For all the years he had been calling this redoubt home, he had never so much as seen the shadow of another human being, which suited him just fine.

The pounding on the door intensified; this time it was accompanied by a faint but audible call for help. Dan was stupefied to realise the voice was that of a child’s.

In two strides he flung open the door, letting in a howling tempest as well as a bedraggled waif clothed in flimsy, peasant garb. The child, a boy of about nine or ten, slumped to the hardwood floor in a pathetic bundle.

“Here, are you okay?” Dan asked the child, gently lifting the boy to lay him on the single cot against the back wall. The urchin opened eyes so stark blue in colour that they resembled the brightest sapphires anyone had ever beheld. Dan was hypnotised by their brilliance, but also because the boy’s eyes were the exact colour of the eyes of his deceased daughter, Mira.

Dan quickly piled a few blankets on the shivering child to combat the cold he had been exposed to. Within a few minutes, colour returned to the boy’s pale cheeks; his previously blue lips changed to a rosy pink. The child had been silently watching Dan with those arresting, mesmerising eyes, and when he spoke, Dan jumped a little.

“Are you the Wildman? The one who eats small children for lunch?” the young lad asked, fear only too pitifully evident in his clear gaze.

“Me? Eat children?” Dan asked in shock. Then he grinned as he realised he must have become a kind of boogeyman parents warned their children against in these remote mountains. He had been thinking he was isolated and alone; it now seemed that he had always been under discreet surveillance.

“Nah, that’s my brother,” Dan joked to ease the troubled soul of the boy, “but don’t worry. He doesn’t live here anymore. He moved to Argentina two years ago because he heard it’s easier to catch mischievous children there,” Dan finished, hoping against hope that the little boy would find his joke humorous.

The smile he was rewarded with confirmed it. With a bit of a squiggle, the young boy sat up against the headboard to look properly at Dan.

“You know, you don’t at all look scary. In fact, I think you look like a really nice man,” the child stated in a purely innocent tone.

“Is that why you weren’t afraid to come knocking at my door?” Dan asked him while he shifted the blankets around the now half-sitting, half-lying boy. “Did you see me before and felt I wouldn’t eat you?”

“No,” the boy replied instantly, “it wasn’t that. Yes, I’ve seen you before a few times on the mountain side, but I always ran away so you wouldn’t catch and eat me. I got lost in this storm looking for Pepe, and your cabin was the only one close by,” the boy admitted.

“Pepe? Is that your brother?” Dan asked. He had started warming up some mushroom soup he had made earlier to offer the boy, thus he was amused when the boy said, “No! Pepe is my little lamb! He’s very naughty and always running off on his own.”

Dan laughed heartily, realising suddenly in mid-laugh that it was the first time in eight long years that he had had occasion to laugh. He had thought he had forgotten how to laugh.

“Ooh, a runaway lamb. So how will you find this rascally Pepe? Aren’t you afraid a wolf or bear has caught him by now?” Dan asked as he filled a small earthen bowl with the now steaming mushroom and corn soup. He placed the bowl with a chunk of bread on a small wooden tray and offered these to the boy. The urchin gratefully took the food and immediately tucked in.

Between mouthfuls, the boy said, “No, Pepe is too clever for predators. He will hide in some crag or under an overhang and wait for me to find him. I always find him,” the boy said with some pride.

Dan was struck by the purity and lack of artifice in the boy. This quality of his resonated especially deeply with him, as Mira had had the same characteristics. His heart suddenly flipped over in his chest when he bizarrely saw her beloved face superimposed over the boy’s. Dan hurriedly rubbed his eyes to clear them of the tears that had pooled unbidden and unwanted in them. Eight long years. Eight years of solitude and an attempt to forget, and just like that she was alive again as if no time had passed.

Clearing his throat gruffly as if trying to expel old, devastating emotions from his chest, Dan now asked the child, “So, youngling. What’s your name? Are you perhaps called Pedro, seeing that your lamb is named Pepe?” he jested.

The little boy emitted a delightful chuckle and said, “You’re funny, Mister. No, my name is Mira.”

The pot of soup Dan had been about to move from the tripod over the fire to the kitchen counter top thudded loudly upon the still glowing fireplace embers. Some of the soup spilled out, sizzling angrily as it hit the cooling cinders. Dan thought he must have misheard and turned hurriedly to face the still eating boy.

“What did you say?” he asked carefully, fearing but desperately needing to hear the reply.

“Mira.”

“But … that’s a girl’s name, isn’t it?” Dan asked inanely. His mind had frozen; his ability to think coherently had suddenly become an impossibility. How could this boy be named after his dead little princess?

“No, it isn’t,” the boy said, looking askew at Dan as if he had insulted him. “My mom said she gave me the name because an angel had come to her on the night I was born, and she had told my mom to name me Mira. She had …”

The boy continued talking, but Dan had stopped listening when the boy had referred to the “angel” as “she”. His heart was now thumping in his chest like a wild beast pleading to be set free; his pulse was a mustang charging unbridled and unfettered across a landscape of memories; his carefully stemmed feelings were punching cracks in his dam walls.

Dan felt as if the world he had known all his life, the world he thought he knew intimately and which held no more surprises for him was threatening to colossally collapse around him, burying him in emotions that would never be submerged again. He felt adrift in a sea of storms not unlike the one still raging wildly outside his mountain retreat.

The boy’s voice finally broke through Dan’s turbulent thoughts, in time for him to hear the child say, “The angel said I would one day save someone’s life without even knowing it, just because my name would be Mira.”

Dan glanced surreptitiously at his bedside table. The pile of pills was stark evidence of what he had planned to do that night. A mountain of guilt tumbled upon Dan, shattering the banks of his carefully shored up grief, causing him to fall to his knees and sob like a babe.

Perturbed and confused, Mira jumped out of bed and hurried over to the kneeling man.

“Mister, are you okay? Did I say something wrong?” he asked in fright.

Reaching out carefully to him, Dan enfolded the boy lovingly in his massive arms and said, “On the contrary, Mira, you said the right thing.”

Outside, the storm inexplicably, unexpectedly abated; sweet silence filled the cabin like a thick fleece of comforting, rejuvenating warmth.