Chapter Text
A bomb falls.
Detonates the site of an ancient chapel.
It's in ruins now.
Animals flee.
Dandelions bloom.
People have never lived there, but their memory did.
That memory is gone now, dispersed in the ashes.
It flickers with the faces of pilgrims who are not aware that they're now eroding.
No mind to recall them, no walls to enclose them, no roof to shelter them.
No one mourns.
A few years later, the dandelions die, ruderal, loyal only to the ruins now carelessly buried.
An edifice rises.
The peonies that are planted hold no impression of that first disaster.
The animals return.
People live there.
No one remembers.
The air is light.
It oppresses no lungs.
Beneath soil and ruin and edifice lie the hands that built the chapel.
They never intended to live there.
Their burial was foreknown.
They knew the pilgrims would never arrive.
They were content with the bombing.
But what they do not understand, what they ask and ask and ask, beneath soil and ruin and edifice, is,
'why are peonies more beloved than dandelions?'