A Sacrifice
In truth, Avogadro’s encounters had never been more than an inconvenience to me. Despite every action he took, despite all the pain and suffering he aimed to inflinct on me, I simply absorbed the Cold, seeped it up through the limbs of my body and kept it inside. And then I returned to my routine, searching for avocados buried underneath the lives of the other residents of my town.
So when She chose to face Avogadro with me, it was the first time I had considered him a real threat to my existence. And it might have been Her presence that influenced this feeling in me… She was looking at me.
What happened later I can hardly remember. In grief, I had sealed it up in an attempt to push away a painful history, against Her wishes and Her warnings. Over the course of several years, I have attempted to stitch the fading scenes together, rifling through my memory. This section of the story may be short, but it consumed the most of my time. Here, under the orange-yellow light, I believe I have constructed the most truthful rendition of the events that occured that day.
She was looking at me. I took one step towards Her, but I could take no more. The Cold flowed through my body, paralyzing me. I tried to speak, but no words came. Had I known that would have been my last moment with Her, I would have done something more. What I would have done, I don’t know what. At the very least, the smallest gesture, a murmur of goodbye, at the very least.
She then picked me up. For I was much shorter compared to Her, She was able to carry me much like a child. She—we—walked towards Avogadro. It was another First, the First I had seen Avogadro so close. His flat hairstyle, his clouding eyes with cataracts, his small mouth and childish nose, they had been all unnoticed by me.
I did not know why She had chosen to bring me so close, and the question was atop my tongue when I realized with such a start that I nearly fell out of Her arms. For Avogadro—he looked exactly like me. My hair was darker, my skin brighter, my eyes clearer and deeper, but these were the superficial differences one could only see from a distance. The angles on his face and the slimness of his shoulders and the length of his legs, they were all mine. They belonged to me—and too to Avogadro.
She set me down so that Avogadro and I were facing each other, as if I were looking into a pale mirror. Here, the Cold had begun to rage within my body, threatening to burst through my skin. How could there be no Cold? The Cold was here, it was alive, it was—it was killing me, and She did not care, and Avogadro was no longer laughing. But like always, he refrained from speaking, and with the cataracts I was unsure that he was truly looking at me. And I wondered, for the First time, if he was feeling the Cold as I did. If the Cold affected him as it did me.
Then She whispered in my ear. She reminded me, in her gentle and kind voice, and it was the last time She had ever spoken to me, and it was the the last thing I had ever heard from Her, and She told me that there was no such thing as Cold.
Of course, I did not understand then, and I would not for many years. I merely watched—
—I merely watched as She placed Her hand over Avogadro’s breast. Suddenly he seemed fuller, the color rose into his cheeks and his eyes cleared and the way he looked upon Her angered me. So much so that despite the paralysis the Cold wreaked on me that I reached out to grab his collar and neck—
—I reached out, but he was gone. And so was She. I was left standing alone in a field of avocados.