Three Lives

My mother was a staunch atheist.

Yet before she died, she donated all her money to a little mountain temple and hanged herself from a beam in the Buddhist hall.

All she left me were three crude clay Buddha statues covered in dust.

I left them in a corner.

But when I accidentally knocked over the milk my disabled roommate had brought me, one of the statues quietly broke.

A slip of paper appeared among the fragments.

After reading it,

I was seized with terror.