Pressed between two halves of a black stone, something ancient, a white flower, symmetrical, a white winged bird. The truth. This day in November with a new snow on the fields of wasted grain he thinks of a story he heard, remembers it is about love and about China. It was, at the time he first heard it, the embodiment of purity and loyalty. Now, like the places where the mud is burning through the snow, he ruins what was pure. His heart is an abacus whose colored beads mark his life and the marriage he is no longer good at. The beads, left to right, compound and compute the lies, especially those that never become words.

His name is Serafin Alegria and he is in love with a woman who thinks they are only friends. She says he is observant, and he is. They have benign conversations where the truth smolders between stone. It usually goes like this:

He tells her that he noticed her eyebrows, the subtle plucking and the crescent moon curve where they taper into her eyes.

He tells her how her eyes, the left one in particular, are the way he knows her, the left eye that betrays her feelings and assures him that they are simply very good friends. He tells her how her eyes are the deep blue of glaciers. He tells her how he would love to lie in an open field with her, as meteors burn red, white, phosphorescent across the sky. He tells her how her eyes are a kite loosed into a clear sky. He tells her how the muzzle of a horse is the softest thing on earth and he tells her that it is how forgiveness must feel. He tells her how he loves her and that she makes him feel young, but instead it comes out as this:

"Your eyebrows look different."

"You're so observant."

"Yes."

He does not tell her his truth, this fossil of a flower no one will ever see.

He thinks of the story and of Ana Ferena, his wife he loved, so many years ago. Ana’s dark eyes were like shadows in a field of ripening grain. He remembers Ana Ferena and how in the distance there were mountains and beyond them the sky that stretches to an untouchable line that recedes and reappears each day and always seems within reach. He loved Ana Ferena once, perhaps more than this friend he has begun to ruin his marriage for. Her hands, when they met, his dark and thin face between them, were like two cranes in flight, but he is more than just a liar.

It was Ana Ferena who told him the story of a woman who, centuries ago in a time before Christ and therefore in advance of the sin he is familiar with, went to look for her husband that had been called away to build what would become The Great Wall of China. When the woman arrived, she found the wall abandoned. It was a late autumn, like this one. The workers had already returned home, but the woman knew, most likely because her heart was beautiful, that her husband would never return. She knew, most likely, because her eyes were similar to Ana’s, that her husband was buried within the Great Wall. The woman cried for her husband and did so until the wall was washed away by her love. The woman in Ana’s story placed the bones of her lover in a basket made of reeds and bamboo. She carried her husband home.

It was at this point in the story that Ana Ferena always paused. She would linger at the end of the story, and there was something about her that made him think of the brief pause of sky between two trees. To Ana Ferena this story was love. She told him that she loved him. A coward does not deserve love. To Serafin Alegria, the story was premonition.

The black stone of the Great Wall was split by someone's love; it has the bones of a white flower pressed within it. The flower is the wings of two cranes. The flower is a truth. The flower is greater than he will ever be. This flower is the first true feathered bird, and Serafin Alegria realized, at the moment of its telling, that no person would ever come in search of his bones or weep walls to rubble for him; he bowed his head with the heavy truth that he was, already, something forgotten.