The Visitor

"Richard, you have a visitor."

One day, Harry came to visit him. It had been so long, though, that at first he didn't know who it was. He had been ravaged by a serious illness. As always, he chatted with Richard, who seemed cheerful, letting the flowers of things past bloom as they were with an unchanging will to look toward the future.

Then, Harry said casually,

"Oh, yeah, do you remember the daughter of that prostitute, the one who was always crying? The other day, she died. But, there was something strange about it. You know the place, that little park outside the city..."

Harry kept talking, but his words no longer reached Richard.

In that moment, his world shattered.

Richard thought he was completely alone. He felt a crushing, terrible loneliness.

He stared at the bible. Then, he resigned himself to fate.

"I couldn't make my prayers to erase the sorrows of the world reach God. I couldn't become the "clown magician" and see her again. I couldn't show her the 'really amazing magic' that would make her smile until the day she died. I couldn't even keep one promise. What could she possibly think about her "clown magician" from her place in Heaven?"

He cried up to the skies,
"Do I still have the right to love you?"

The wind that had been blowing in his heart quietly vanished.

"Now I'm on my way to you...Maria..."
[Index]