Crematorium for Phoenixes by Nikola Yanchovichin

microcosm of balance and
meaningfulness.
    And life had been arranged like units in an
exquisite Chinese box with brass fittings. They landed on this site
and it left little room for doubt.
    As we have mentioned, crystal blue beaches
with porcupine-like needles in the form of palms dotted the area
and cast shadows over the valleys. The combs were tucked like
glades of fairy tales.
    Around them, as if adding even more to this
idyllic scene, a grain of crushed powder unfolded like a fan of
colors. Waterfalls flowed and fish jumped under them, stunned by
the outflow of gallons of water.
    This was a site without care, which the
Almighty had prepared for His children to give them a piece of His
essence.
    But sneaking up like the snake in paradise,
the evil, hour by hour, seemed to increase its strength and was
seducing people with the flattery of its tongue.
    Thus, the group rushed even deeper through
this wilderness, leaving behind the grass and houses abandoned by
every living soul that had appeared here and there. These abodes,
as if still filled with peering eyes, hinted at the gazebos and
wells that also weren’t looking too friendly. Floating over them
and cheapening the view soared mysterious balls of blue flame that
people in later centuries would call “hitodama.”
    The company, like in the fairy tales, delved
deeper and deeper into the scary forest that nobody had been able
to find their way back home from.
    And the farmland, the smelled of the kettle,
disappeared, giving way to the wetlands. They kept an ashy green
haze and croaks from frogs could be heard like in those old movies
where the frame shifts and changes into a pastora background with
sad Celtic music suctioned from a symphony made of bones.
    The company, like many others in life,
unloaded as if in a park in front of the hospital with iron hoops
stuck in alleyways. And despite the seemingly ambient amount of
life, they still got the sense that everything was simply saying,
“Get out of here.”
    But as happens every day, they had no
choice. As if blinded by that fatality that remained as a stigma
that ulcerated the body and spirit, they moved on, pushed forward
to every action.
    Because in life the big bad wolf is the
grief that played like a cat with us and then broke the backbone of
our dreams.
    But even so, finding a clean place for our
hearts and dedicating it to what we like is the courage with which
we go into the forests of the beast.
    The men remembered those terrifying moments
in which they waited with one another for death itself. This time
death encouraged them as they moved along the path of the jungle,
which implemented sounds that stretched out like a sleeping giant
for miles and miles.
    Soon they began to encounter broken or
hollowed out gravestones. There were billions of stones, pieces
ground to powdered palisades until they reached a wall whose ruins
had tens of thousands of plants and shrubs that clung to it like
leeches.
    It had been made of cyclopean stones,
stacked one after the other and designed to hold something both
inside and outside.
    Although there were plenty of dissolved
holes covered with relegated material and loose vegetation like
ropes, it took the men awhile to climb the ruin, which was hundreds
of feet high. As we have said the plants had grown one over another
like baobab.
    But, finally, after they had climbed it—a
task that would have hampered even the most experienced
climbers—they came to the rim and looked down across the green
jungle that spread out and away from them. A slope curved down like
an amphitheater crater, so they descended, breathing rapidly from
the height.
    Then they were climbing down.
    The men soon lost track of time. They were
careful not to slip on the slopes of the crater, which had been
carved by the incalculable strength of nature.
    They rested, leaned over it, and marked the
trail so that they would be able to go back again. After three
hours, as measured by the sun’s rays, they had