Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

The sun had risen now, the day was bright. The blue water bobbed in white caps that sparkled like no shining ocean I’d ever seen before. The boat was drifting as Jazz stared in wonder at Torstein — and Pete, who drew away from him a new man, standing taller even than before. The awful pallor, that had colored him from the moment those thugs had driven away with Torstein, was now replaced by a flushed radiance of joy that reflected the glow of our amazing friend.

The ladies were crying, so touched were they by Torstein’s words. I guess I was still staring, silent, mute.

“Look here,” Torstein said. “I’m going away. To my Father — and your Father. You’ll follow me there in his good timing, but until we meet again, you know what you have to do. Love is your common bond. Joy is your strength. Beauty, grace, forgiveness, mercy. That’s all I can leave with you. And it’s all you need.”

“Do you have to go?” Sully said.

Kneeling down to face the boys, Torstein replied:

“I’m already gone. Look at me. I’m already too alive to be here. Did you ever see anyone glow like this?”

“You always glowed ...” Sully said.

“So do you,” Torstein said, pulling both boys close, hugging them. “Now you’ve got to go on glowing, and glow even more, because I won’t be here. You’ve got to be the sunflowers that spring up from my seeds. That’s what I’m asking you to do. Will you do it?”

Both boys agreed they would, though I doubt they understood what he was asking.

He stood up, buoyant, full of life, and it was easy to see that what he’d told the boys was true. He wasn’t dead anymore, but he was too alive for this place. His vigor was overwhelming the clothes he wore, even somehow the body he inhabited — and we could tell that wherever this vitality came from, it was bursting to get back there. It was too much for this world. It was something huge and powerful, beautiful, but just too much.

“It’s all right,” he said. “you’ll be like this, too, when you continue on the way of love. Your body may wither and die, maybe you’ll perish violently like I did, but the spirit you’ve inherited from me today will grow and abound and expand until you’ll be too big and too alive to stay here. Looking back from the other side, you’ll see this world was a cold, dead place compared to the world to come, the world that is, waiting for you — where I am.”

“I thought you said we created the world we’d always wanted when we acted in love,” Tawny said.

“Exactly! You’re changing this world, and you’re being changed by it. You’ll find that in the end you come to the same place, the place of life that’s more living than any life you’ve ever lived.” He grinned as if he were making sense, and all the light around us on this bright spring morning seemed to coalesce in his eyes. “That place is pulling me back. And right now, it’s beginning to pull at you, too. From this moment on, you’ll only be growing more and more homesick for this place of abundance where you’ve never been. But I’m there, and I’m with you.”

I can’t begin to tell you what happened after that. I don’t think I rightly know. There was an enormous amount of light, but of a kind that didn’t seem to hurt our eyes. And there was a wonderful sea breeze with a tangy taste and smell of salt that somehow cooled and refreshed. There was a hole in the sky where the clouds made way for a glimpse of deepest blue, like dark night beyond. And there was Torstein, over all, above all, in all ... And then he was gone.

Jazz turned the boat around, to take us back to the mainland. In our eyes, and in our hearts, each of us carried a little bit of the astonishing glow that had leapt from Torstein’s smile. We had begun to live in the corners of that smile. We’d begun to be called to another land, another world, only reached by militant loving ... radical caring ... outrageous giving ... furious forgiving. And we wanted it so badly, we were committed to pursue it, and to share it, with all our lives. Heaven in a handful of sunflower seeds.

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