Page 11 - My FlipBook

Her father interrupted her. “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “We did not know about
the giant. Once we learned, we stopped selling the water and waited for you
to come home.”

After they all hugged and cried with happiness, Bonnie noticed that The
Olmal was in the room. She looked at him, unsure of what to say, feeling
some of the old anger rising in her chest.

But The Olmal raised his hand and spoke, slowly and with shame, “When I
was a boy, the same age as you were when you left, I climbed up the mountain
to see what caused the waterfalls ... even though I wasn’t supposed to. I
found the giant and, like you, I asked him why he was so sad. He never
answered and I decided that if he could be so rude to me, a small boy who
wanted to help him, then he deserved to be sad. Every year I thought about
the sad giant on the top of the mountain and what I might do to make him
stop crying, but then I remembered that he was rude to me when I tried to
help him. The years passed, one after the other, faster than you could ever
imagine, and soon enough, I began to believe that the sadness of a rude giant
on one side of the scale was less of a weight than the happiness of so many
good people on the other side. It wasn’t until you ran off to look for another
giant that I realized I was wrong. All our happiness was false happiness, since
it was built on the tears of another.”

Bonnie’s Mother asked The Olmal, “Could you please tell this story to all the
other villagers?”

“I already have,” said The Olmal. “In time they will understand. In time.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And, in time, they did. And, in time, all the giants came to Bonnie’s moun-
tain. And there were seventeen of them! But this was when Bonnie was an
old woman and had children and grandchildren of her own. And well after the
lake had dried up and most of the villagers had moved away.

So what happened to the giants? Are they still there? Most of them are, yes.

Did they all live happily ever after? Well ... Some did and some didn’t. Just like
normal people.

But none of them ever became so sad or so lonely again that they sat at the
top of a mountain and cried waterfalls.

The End.