The cemetery was swept by the autumn wind. On the bowed shoulders of those there to bid farewell, a light, chilly rain poured. Everyone hoped that the ceremony would be over soon.
All of them, excluding her.
Émilie. The deceased’s mother. She remained still. The environment around her, the noise, and the cold didn’t affect her. All that mattered was the closed coffin before her. Lucas, her son, inside. Her sole child. Her life.
She was not allowed to glimpse his body. “Too damaged,” they said. It would be better to preserve the image of his happy face. Émilie, however, would have done anything to say farewell, to kiss him one last time, to caress his hair.
A young woman in black, lovely and far away, stood next to her, her lips quivering, her eyes gleaming as she gazed up at the sky. It was his prematurely widowed partner. Whispers got around fast. They claimed it was too unjust and hurtful.
Émilie, however, didn’t hear it. She was absorbed in her past.
She had hurried, ecstatic, to inform Julien that she was pregnant twenty years prior. He would soon become a father. The three of them together was already in her mind. However, a different woman opened the door that day. with Julien’s shirt on. And he was practically giggling behind her.
Émilie had said nothing. Then she was gone.
Soon later, Lucas was born. With her mother’s assistance, she reared him by herself. She didn’t start a new life. Her son would always come before any man.
That son was gone now.
She was startled out of her reverie by a sudden sound.
A voice.
Clear yet faint. Lucas’s voice was the one she recognized the most.
Her heart thumping, she froze. Then he dashed over to the casket.
She was already tearing at the lid with a strength no one knew she possessed, despite their best efforts to stop her.
Everyone remained motionless when the timber eventually gave way.
There was nothing in the coffin.
Only a tiny tape recorder was present, resting at the bottom and playing continuously: “Mom I’m present. Mom. I’m present.
The crowd was startled. With a ghostly white face, Lucas’s companion took a step back.
Émilie, on the other hand, gazed into the void before gently moving into the mists without turning around.
Her son was never seen again.
Furthermore, nobody really knows what transpired that day.
Something unfathomable had happened in that tumult of stillness and weeping.
A peculiar warmth suddenly filled Émilie’s grief-shattered heart.
A shine. A sigh. A ray of hope.
A chill. A spark. A waiting.
“I hope,” the mother said.
Perhaps her son was still alive.
Perhaps he was still alive and out there.
And she would continue to hope as long as she was breathing.
