Morning on a farm. From behind a grate, Anna, ten, watches a cow lying on its side in the straw, moaning. Her mother Francesca, who runs the farm alone, comes in with the veterinarian. The verdict is quick: acute peritonitis, nothing to be done except spare the animal further pain. Francesca nods. Anna, unseen until now, runs.
Across the fields, where a group of farmhands is stacking wood for a great pyre, she climbs the hill to her grandfather's house. Ercole is eighty-four, once a painter, now confined to a sofa in a darkened living room full of his own canvases, one of them a Hercules on the pyre. His body is a map of pain. That same morning, with immense effort, he has fetched a knife from the kitchen and hidden it under the cushion. He is going to end it today.
Anna lets herself in with the key under the log. She tells him her mother wants to kill the cow. He weighs the words and asks, gently, whether her mother might have her reasons. Then he asks if they have ever done the chrysanthemum. He has her bring the little lap easel and, in a trembling hand, draws the flower for her, petal behind petal, and tells her what it means: in Italis is the flower of the dead, in Japan kiku, the golden flower, a symbol of life, longevity, immortality, worn by the imperial house. He hands her the pencil, and lies down with his back to her, wide awake, feeling for the knife.
Francesca's pickup arrives before he can act. She takes Anna home, angry that she came without asking. In the truck she tries to explain that what she is doing for the cow is mercy. Anna will not hear it. She shuts herself in her room with her Walkman and, all afternoon, draws.
By evening the drawing is finished, a meadow of chrysanthemums, and for a moment Anna forgets to be angry. Francesca, looking for a way back to her daughter, suggests they show it to Grandpa. They drive past the pyre, now built, an effigy of an old woman being hoisted to its top.
Francesca switches on the light in Ercole's living room. He is slumped on the sofa in his own blood, still alive. While her mother phones for an ambulance, Anna goes to him and takes his hand. He looks at her: he can't even manage this anymore, what is he still here for. Anna holds up the drawing. He simply smiles.
Francesca carries her daughter out. In the truck the ambulance lights pass across Anna's wet face; in the fields the pyre burns and the community sings, flames rising like petals in the wind. Somewhere a cow is lowing.
Years later, in the same barn, a woman with a mole beneath her left eye pulls a calf into the world and watches it stand. Anna, grown, comes home, where a framed meadow of golden chrysanthemums hangs by the door.
