My sister's visit

   We did not expect her. There was no reason to do that, especially after we had buried her only a couple years back. When she rang, the doorbell did that strange repetition, the way it sounded back when she was alive. When our mother opened the door, she stood in front of her for a long time. Then, almost in slow motion, she fainted. I ran towards her and checked for bruises, trying to wake her up and the same time. I had neglected to look at the door and at the person standing right there.

 She came in as my mother recovered her senses and started crying for no apparent reason. I told her to relax and, as I could, I helped her to the couch, where she could be much more comfortable. Then, I realize the door was still open, so I walked towards it and closed it. When I turned around, it was as if I had a vision. I saw my father, by the window, holding my sister’s hand. He looked at her as if it was the very first time he was looking at her brown eyes and long hair.

 The vision was special, as they were both standing against what little light entered the apartment. It was raining a lot outside and we hadn’t turned on the lights inside the house. The vision was so special; that I absolutely forgot about my mother in the couch or that my sister couldn’t be there because she was dead. But it was my mother who dragged me to the real world when she asked, almost in a whisper, what my sister was doing there. Strange enough, my sister laughed.

 It was a very particular laugh. Not a loud one at all. To be honest, the sound seemed to be coming from a place much farther than the living room next to the window. I walked towards her and then I saw her body very next to mine. My response came in without intention, just from deep within my soul: I started crying profusely. Think tears ran down my face and landed on the floor making a very particular sound. I noticed my father was also crying and my mother had fallen silent.

 It was her, walking slowly from the couch to the window, who looked at my sister and asked her if she was doing fine. The question was exceedingly strange but my sister had no problem answering it. She told us she was perfect, had never been better, but that she had been granted a special permission to visit us. Apparently, after you die, you get to come back once, wherever and whenever you choose. She had decided that was the perfect time to come and visit us. We asked her why and she explained it had seem like the best moment to her.

 That answer confused me a lot but it didn’t seem to mind my parents. Their faces denoted happiness beyond anything they had felt in a long time. It was sad to realize, but I hadn’t been enough for them to be happy about. To be fair, I didn’t really bring a spark of joy into the house. My sister, on the contrary, had always been full of life and that was apparently still true, even if the statement was particularly strange at the moment. She had always been their baby girl.

 Of course, it did help that she was their first one. Her death had been very hard on everyone. She was a very young woman still and no one had ever predicted she would die so soon. It was all because of a car crash, a horrible event that lived in their memories as a scar that won’t go away. She had been the only victim of that accident, which made everything feel even more unfair and horrible that it already was. She had been pronounced dead right on the spot, before anyone could see her.

 We decided, or rather, my parents decided they wanted to have a small funeral for her. They did not want a huge amount of people to be there only to gossip and to cry like crazy when they had never really liked her or known her as they had known her. So we had a very private ceremony, a really silent one. I wanted to ask her about it but it felt wrong not to enjoy her presence instead of asking things that didn’t made a difference anymore. I decided to put the teapot on the stove.

 My parents sat down with her on the couch. They touched her hair and her hands and fondled her face.  They didn’t talk much and the only thing they said was that she was beautiful and smart and the best daughter they could ever have. Her face was very white and her expressions were a little bit… dead. It was as if her attitude reminded them that she was actually dead and she was only there for a while. But they didn’t care because it was an opportunity they never knew they had.

 They talked about the past while drinking tea. She had some and loved it, it was the only authentic expression of joy she showed. They spent a long while in silence and then my mother realized she could do something for her right there. She decided to cook my sister her favorite meal, so both of them stood up and almost ran to the kitchen. In minutes, they were pots on the fire and chopped vegetables, as well as meat cuts waiting to be put on very hot pans. It was a beautiful sight, one of warmth and happiness, never minding the storm outside.

 My father was very silent the whole time and he just looked at them while they cooked. Tears went down his face every so often, in complete silence. He was obviously beside himself to have his daughter for a while. But I knew he was asking himself the same questions I was asking: for how long was she going to stay? And, what will happen when she leaves? Remembering her visit would be a privilege but it honestly didn’t seem to be something mortals would be allowed to have.

 Some time later, I helped them serve and we had a very tasty lunch at the dining table, as we used to when we were younger. As back then, we laughed and told different stories. We also ate all of the food, which was delicious and made me realized I wasn’t dreaming or at least it didn’t seem like it. We didn’t turn on the lights for lunch and it was clear my sister didn’t care for light at all, as the sight of thunder outside made her appearance much less beautiful that minutes before.

 We continued talking, remembering the past, even after we finished the food. Mom served coffee and cookies, the ones my sister used to love. She drank it all and ate several cookies. My mother was absolutely happy and it was clear she didn’t want the day to end. It was clear none of us had veer wanted something like this to happen, but now that it had we didn’t want this beautiful dream to end. We wanted my sister, their daughter, back from where she was, forever.

 But that wasn’t possible. A few hours later, my sister asked to go to her room. My parents hadn’t changed anything there, going to the extent of closing the room since her death and never opening it again. Apparently, she wanted to have a nap, feeling exceedingly tired. We all looked at each other, knowing that it was probably the sign that indicated she had to leave very soon. We all helped her into bed and sat besides her, my mother even singing a lullaby from our childhood.

 My sister fell fast asleep in seconds. For some reason, we all started crying in silence, as we realized that her body had disappeared in the glimpse of an eye. She wasn’t there anymore, we couldn’t feel her anymore and it was horribly devastating.

 It was in that moment, when I felt that pain in my heart, when I woke up from that dream. The first thing I felt, beside my heart in pain, was a single tear running down my face and landing on my pillow. I almost couldn’t breath, as I had seen her one more time.

Louis's party

It had not been love at first sight. That would have been impossible, as they had met in a place were no one could actually see the other person’s face. Of course, that party was a very secret one and only people that knew other people could have been invited. But the point is that both Rémy and Luc had been invited that night and they had both participated in one of the largest secret parties to take place in all of France and probably all of Europe too. No one knew for sure how big the whole thing was, as one of the most powerful people in the country had organized it.

 The party took place in an actual palace, where other such parties had taken place, maybe three hundred years ago or more. Of course, in those times people did things like crazy, like animals, and they had no rules to make everyone feel their best and leave without any concern. This modern party had many rules and one of the most important ones, the first one in fact, was that it was forbidden for anyone to remove the mask they had been provided by the organized via mail. All masks were identical and there laid one of the key features of the party.

 Technically, every single person was the same. And, according to the rules, they were all the same to the eyes of the organizer and also each other. Of course, they were women and men but, as large as the palace was, there were lots of smaller parties within the big one. Some of those were gender exclusive, some others completely forbid clothes and there was even one where clothes were actually mandatory. It could be said that there was something for everyone and the statement would be true because Louis had made that happen.

 Louis was not his real name but it was the name he liked to be called. He was obsessed by everything that had to do with the reign of Louis the XIVth, so he had chosen that name as his secret identity for everyone to know in order to organize those parties. Of course, no one in the country knew that those gatherings actually existed but there were many rumors and people all around thought it wasn’t that farfetched as rich people tend to have things that no one thinks anyone would need. And a lot of something is always in the mix.

 The location of the party changed every year and after it had happened everything was returned in the most perfect of conditions, in the case the place was rented which happened a lot. Louis was smart enough not to use his own estates, although he was always tempted to do so. He was obsessed with everything being perfect and interior designing was one of his many obsessions. He had houses and flats all over the place and he loved to make them look their best. So he did exactly that with the rentals for his parties, everything had to be perfect.

 Luc was not as rich as Louis but one could say they ran the same circuit. It wasn’t difficult to see him in all “must” parties in the cities, always showing his face in all kinds of events. Luc’s parents had died ten years ago and had left him with a very large fortune. Now his uncle managed the company that his father had built and he let his nephew do whatever he wanted to do. Having been rich from such an early age, Luc had gone crazy in all sorts of predictable ways. His uncle had done a lot to avoid the press trying to destroy him with pictures and other “evidence”.

 He had done a lot of drugs when he was around sixteen years old. He had dated publicly both men and women. He was one of those jetsetters that travel around the world just showing their money to anyone who was willing to watch him. But the interesting thing about him was that he was the most charming young man ever to be found. He never seemed to be showing off and he even had a very caring heart that made him make big donations to many charities and institutions that really help people around the globe.

 Luc was a very weird mix and that’s why some loved him and others loathed him. Of course that happened because of how rich he was and we all know people love to hate people that are out of their reach. But even so that was the case, he didn’t care at all about how people perceived him. He really knew how to live a life where the first thing was to be himself, his original self. That’s how he met Louis, at a party where Luc was being exactly the same guy he always was. And that was very interesting to Louis who loved authentic people.

 Right away, having met him only minutes before, Louis invited Luc to his party and Luc accepted. Of course, he had been to many other parties like that one before, but never one so exclusive and lavish. His normal parties were much raunchier and he didn’t even care if it wasn’t as private as it could be. Of course, that had been a headache for his uncle for many years but now it was him that knew how to handle the press and all other people that the only thing they wanted was a big piece of his wealth or a fragment of his fame.

 It was there, in the annual party thrown by Louis, where Luc met the first person in the world that made him feel something he had never felt before. He wasn’t ready for it, not at all. He had never thought that he would actually fall in love one day. But he did. Not at the party of course, or right away, but it happened in the following months and he suffered, as he had never felt something like it before. It was almost torture but bearable and worth the pain.

 Rémy was the son of a baker and a housewife. He had been raised in one of the more modest neighborhoods in all of Paris. From a very young age, he had realized he liked other men. The day he realized it was one of the few anecdotes he liked to tell his lovers right after having sex and he didn’t really know the reason for it. He just liked to tell them how he looked at all the other boys in his class when he was fourteen years old, in the classroom, in the yard and in the bathroom. He stared and was very attentive of everything they did.

 Some lovers lasted for a few days, even one night. Others lasted much more, even as long as two years. That one was the hardest thing for him because he became numb after that relationship ended. It had been both toxic and ideal, beautiful and a disaster. He never wanted to go through that again so that’s why, every single Friday and Saturday after work, he would go to his small flat, change clothes and then leave for many hours, to visit his favorite places in the city. Some were sex clubs, some were dancing clubs, and some were bars.

 The choice of the day depended on how his week had gone for him. He worked two jobs: one in a magazine were he was practically a delivery boy, even if his parents had sacrificed themselves to give him the best education ever, including an university degree, and another job working as a barista in of the many cafés in the city. He left the second job late at night and he had two hours to prepare for his night out. It was then, in the dark, when he could finally be himself. In time, he heard about Louis’s parties and he really wanted in.

 However, money was needed to enter one of those. Not that the actual entry had a fee but that only people with lots of money could enter one of those meetings. So he did something he had never done before and that was using his sexuality to convince another man to get him invited. Of course, the trick work because, as Remy said himself, there’s nothing easier than convincing a man of doing anything when you have him by the balls, sometimes literally. So he got to the annual party and was surprised to see how others lived a life like his own.

 There, he met Luc. At first it was all about sex, which was fun even with those white masks. But then Luc found him in the “real world” and they began to talk between more sexual encounters. After some time, they stopped with the sex but kept seeing each other, getting to know one another in a way none of the two had ever thought possible. Rémy was very scared of it all as he had never felt like he could be loved, he felt himself too ugly and awful for that. He didn’t know, but Luc felt exactly the same.

Dolly

   Everyone looked through the window. They almost seemed unable to breath. The specialists on the other side were carefully helping the female elephant to get on the floor and lay down on her side. The animal was strangely restless and wouldn’t listen to any human. She gave a couple steps backwards and some forward. Her eyes went from the people around her, to the window, to the door. For a moment, some thought she was trying to figure out how the get out of there, by force if necessary. But the truth was that she was really restless.

 One of the people around her injected her with a serum to make her a bit more manageable, as they needed her on the floor and not pacing around in desperation. Of course, in the wild, the animal had her young whenever she felt was a safe and good place to have hit. It wasn’t a thing of being comfortable but more to do with the fact of being safe. In that room, however, she didn’t feel safe at all and that’s why she kept moving and refused to do what was natural. She felt danger all around and she was all that wrong.

 After all, every woman and man around her were there to take way her young as soon as she had it. Or at least that was the initial idea, until they discusses it and arrived to the conclusion that taken the cub away from the mother could have really important consequences for his survival. The baby probably needed his mother’s milk but also her protection and love. If they showed her they only wanted to help, maybe she wouldn’t feel so hostile towards them and may even be able to let them do their research on him, if that was their goal.

 After a second injection, the elephant finally lay down on the floor on her side. She begin to make a really weird sound that one expert called a “sign of melancholia”. It was very strange to attribute human traits to animals but it wasn’t uncommon to see creatures behaving exactly like actual people, especially when they have been living or have been very close to a large amount of people or even just one person in particular. It happens with dogs and even with cats and birds. It’s a strange form of attachment, still pretty uncommon though.

 They soon started making tests on her and helping her breathe properly. The people behind the glass were glued to it, as it was the first time that they would be in the presence of the miracle of life. The women there had never had children and no one had been in the room for the delivery of a human baby, much less and elephant baby. They were looking forward to it but the process also made them really nervous because they knew elephants could be very temperamental and even a real danger if you were in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

 But the one there was to drugged up to do anything against anyone. A couple of scientists started massaging the animal’s belly, trying to stimulate the birth. It was a very long process until some of the effect of the drugs wore off and it was the creature herself that pushed the baby out because she obviously felt obliged to do it. She was desperate to have her baby and once she had it, she turned around her head to see how he was and if he was alive. Elephants would even eat the placenta too, as nutritious as it is but that didn’t happen.

 The mother touched her cub with the trunk and then let out a very loud sound that seemed to be product of fear or something worse. Again, they gave her a shot and she was sleepy for a while and then fell asleep for real. The baby was then helped to her milk and while he was getting fed, they measured everything and started taking pictures. The people behind the glass couldn’t do that because their cellphones had been taken away form them but they understood why: the new creature they were looking at was something else.

 The process had been a success and the insemination of an elephant with DNA from an extinct species had been successful. The young mammoth seemed to be just perfect. He was drinking milk like crazy but he also seemed to be very curious, looking around the room and at the people. His fur was still a little bit wet but the thick brown fur could easily be appreciated. One scientist dared to take off his gloves and attempt t touch him but the supervisor caught him just in the right second. They couldn’t allow that.

 After eating, the creature seemed to be very interested in his surroundings. He even walked slowly towards the glass and lightly touched it with his trunk. The people on the other side were ecstatic, they couldn’t even begin to understand how amazing what they were watching was. No human had seen one of those for the last four thousand years and now, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, there was a mammoth walking around, touching almost everything with his trunk, being caressed softly by the scientist that were proud of their work.

The cub went back to his mother and he seemed to notice that she wasn’t really responding. The reason was simple: she was asleep after all the effort and didn’t have the opportunity to properly meet her child. However, most people had noticed that the mother had not been very eager to see him as much as the scientists were. It was pretty understandable: after all, she was an elephant and she had just delivered a baby into the world that didn’t look like her, at all.

 As the cub moved around and did small sounds with his trunk, the people behind the glass were simply over the moon. They had been told that they were going to see something very special and amazing but they would have never guessed an extinct creature was the secret of the facility. They thought a cure for some awful disease had been found or that something to do with communications had been discovered. The world did not receive news like this one every day so it wasn’t a surprise that every electronic device had been taken from them

 They were given five more minutes for observation and then a very kind young woman came and told them to exit the room and follow her. They did exactly that and joined her to a conference room, where she left them alone for a couple of minutes. In that time, every single one of them bursted into talk, saying how simply incredible what they had seen was. Their general opinion was that what they had just seen could be one of those world-changing things people love to talk about. It could be very big and important.

 The group was made of entrepreneurs, journalists and other scientists whose specialty was not biology. The woman came back and asked them to fill a survey and they she told them they could begin elaborate their plans but that they would need final approval by the laboratory in order to publish a paper, release a statement about any ideas or projects or anything related to the mammoth. They all nodded and the woman left again, with the promise to return their electronic devices to them when she returned. And so she did.

 As the men and women were being escorted to the entrance, they realized that the secret was really important for the people that had done this. And they also realized that the laboratories had challenged some ethical procedures. Besides that, they hadn’t been presented with an explanation of why they had done what they had done. And why a mammoth? Other animals had been dead for millions of years and DNA had also been found from them. Why not a dinosaur or an ancient wolf or an extinct tropical bird?

 The moment they stepped the parking lot, most of them started calling their boards or their most trusted advisors. Ideas had come up in the way to the front gate and they were already envisioning many things to do with the creature. It was a small and furry gold mine that could translate in many more extinct gold mines in the future. But their enthusiasm was broken when a scientist ran towards the lady that had attended to them and announced something sad: “The mammoth and his mother just died”.