The cold wind deepens the dry lines on his skin. Philippe puts back on his uniform shirt in front of the tomb stone, avoiding the deep cut on his right upper arm. Blood down to his fingers has turned clotted. Under the sleeve, a red fire ant traces the blood lines up to his arm. It stings on his open wound. He sits down on the bulging tree root between two graves and waits for the sun to rise.

Thirty years ago, his father built the house next to the tree. It is a Xiao Tong Tree. His father told him that this kind of tree can only survive in the rocky desert far between the oceans. Philippe could see the light in his father’s eyes when he talked about the tree. It was as if it was the tree making his father move here. Here, a place called Fecundus, is a barren land. The only green is the moss under the rocks. The green cannot live long. It dries and turns brown from the heat rising from the underground. The tree is the only life.

Philippe cannot help to notice the enormous trunk of the tree. His father told him that if a Pancala snail, which only lives in the desert, with its cup-shaped shell starts to crawl around the tree, it would take six summers. This perennially harsh air keeps the tree ever green.

Everyone called his father Virgil. Before Virgil moved to Fecundus, he lived in Noris Brochi. He was the best carpenter in town. He didn’t just make plain chairs and tables. He craved flowers and birds on the wood. Virgil had a wife, Helena. She helped Virgil polishing the furniture. With her slim fingers, she could dig out wood chips deep in hollow lines where the wings or petals were.

The year when Philippe was born, Virgil and Helena experienced seven months of rain. The walls in the house were covered with moss. Leeches were on the ceiling, on their bed, on Virgil’s toe, on Helena’s un-recovered vulva wound. Half of the people in town had left in the second month of the rain. The whole town was grey and wet. Children became sick. Beginning of the eighth month of the rain, Virgil left with his wife and child.

They came to Fecundus. Philippe and his mother often stayed at home without his father. Sometimes his father stayed out for a week. Sometimes for months. But every time when his father came home, he always brought bread and wine.

His mother dies, after his father hasn’t returned for a year.

He has to stay until the sun rises.

The sunlight disturbs Philippe’s drowsy eyes. It gradually covers the shadow with radiance. The light crawls up to the tree; paves the surface of the few leaves left on the branches with golden hue. A few breaths later, the color turns crimson, as thick as clotted blood on his arm. Clear dew, as if rolling red drops hastily, falls onto the rocks with no sound. A thin vapor rises through the tree’s naked branches. It smells of boiling red rose petals with a hint of burning candle.

Tears roll down on his cheek.

He stands up. He lays down his mother and seals the sunlight and a few leaves six-feet under.