Mother last saw her nephew, Vicent, in the month of March during the festival of Las Fallas. As was tradition for them, Mother along with her sister, Aitana, and their two families went to the bonfires at Valencia’s city hall. It was midnight. Because Vicent barely had anything to say to her, and Aitana kept their conversation quite superficial, and Father was away working at the hospital, Mother felt quite bored. She watched the piled cardboard and papel maché installations catch fire. The buildings around them perspired grey and golden. She felt the crisping warmth of the flames and the heat from the crowd around her. She was with loved ones, surrounded by others, but in her heart and mind she felt completely alone.
Months passed. Mother was missing the days when Vicent was younger—she would pick him up from school, and they would take the local train together back to her home. Now Vicent had grown old enough to manage himself, but it was summer vacations, and Mother wanted to ask him to come over. She called up her sister but Vicent wasn’t at home. He was in the park with his friends playing football. Mother could have kept talking to Aitana and most likely she would have invited her over out of sympathy. However Mother was having a passing idea that she wanted to act on before it passed on.
So Mother left her conversation with Aitana. She walked to the train station near her place and took a cercania to the southern suburbs. She knew Vicent practiced in the Park Catarroja. He and his friends had hung out there for years even before he was formally on any football team. As she expected, he and a group of boys were kicking a ball in the grass. Vicent was recognisable instantly. He was a short kid with a small patch of hair above his lip, not a firm moustache like an adult’s, but growing and thickening to resemble one.
Mother didn’t recognise the other children around him. Some had olive skin that had bronzed well in the sun. Some had bushy hair or crew cuts, styled to match their favourite football stars. Some had taken their shirts off to show off their muscular bodies and the trails of curls reaching towards their shorts.
Unlike Vicent, who still had the look of a child, these boys were much further in their development into men.
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