TC & EWS - Miss You

Title: The Last Garden of St. Francis

Story by Joseph C. Jukic

Joe walked the cracked sidewalks of the old neighborhood with his hands in his coat pockets, the wind biting and whispering of things long gone. Not just the people — though many had vanished, moved on, or disappeared into grief or addiction — but the animals. The chirping of sparrows. The rustle of raccoons in the alley. The fox that once prowled near the school fence at dusk like a shadow of the wild.

He missed them all.

But most of all, Joe missed Tom — the strange, kind man in the brown robe. His friend. A Franciscan who took his vows of poverty and peace with the same intensity he once brought to blockbuster film sets. Yes, that Tom. After Hollywood, he had vanished into the slums with nothing but a satchel and a worn-out copy of the Canticle of the Creatures.

"Brother Wind, Sister Moon," Tom used to whisper, smiling as he knelt to feed a squirrel from his palm, or talk gently to the possums that wandered near the friary. Kids thought he was crazy. Maybe he was. But to Joe, Tom had been the only sane one left.

They had once turned a gravel lot into a secret garden. Raised bees, fed stray cats, and even tried (briefly) to breed butterflies in the back of a burned-out community center. And then the concrete crept in. The birds fell silent. The soil turned sour. And one day, Tom was gone.

No note. No goodbye. Just a hand-drawn icon of St. Francis embracing a dying mammoth, thumbtacked to the old friary door. It read:
"Even extinction is not the end. Love survives the abyss."

Joe kept it folded in his wallet.

Now, walking past the chain-link fence where the mulberry tree once stood, Joe knelt and placed a bowl of water in the weeds. It was something Tom used to do — "just in case the angels come as animals."

A girl on a scooter stopped and stared.
“Who’s it for?” she asked.

Joe smiled.
“An old friend,” he said. “And the last fox.”

That night, Joe dreamed of a great garden. Not Eden. Something new. A resurrection of what man had forgotten. Tom was there in his robe, barefoot and radiant, talking to a creature that looked like a lion with peacock feathers and antlers.
“Still got work to do, Joe,” Tom said. “The garden's not finished yet.”

Joe nodded. He woke with tears in his eyes, but also something else — resolve.

In the morning, Joe found a kid's mural painted on the underpass wall: birds with crowns, wolves reading books, a tiger with wings. Underneath, someone had scrawled:

“To Brother Tom. The animals still remember.”

Joe placed his hand on the brick and whispered,
"I remember too."

Then he went to find some seeds.