The island without parents

Guè assumes leadership of the group with the severity of someone who knows no alternative: rationing food and water, maintaining order, and waiting for the boat to arrive. But death has not stopped. One after another, the children who climb, look out from an upper floor, or simply grow in stature die with the same sudden symptoms that killed the adults. Guè senses that the danger is linked to height above the ground, but he keeps this conviction to himself and begins, almost involuntarily, to use it to govern the surviving children, promising them future responsibilities tied precisely to the moment when, as they grow, they approach the deadly threshold.

Among the remaining children, Carlito—who, in a moment of despair, had destroyed the village’s only radio—is the first to intuitively grasp the rule: he begins walking on his knees, drawing mockery from the others and even from Guè. Then Marcela, having witnessed the death of a companion who had grown taller, reaches the same conclusion and, together with Carlito, secretly measures the height of the surviving children. Gonzalo, the closest to the critical threshold, proudly rejects the hypothesis with teenage arrogance, preferring another theory—detachment from the ground, not body height—and continues to live without precautions.

The divide between those who bend to survive and those who refuse to do so becomes a social fracture: Carlito and those who follow him are isolated and mocked by the rest of the group, led by Gonzalo, who in the meantime counts the days until the boat's arrival by carving notches on a beam. When a violent storm forces everyone into urgent work, Gonzalo and Raul, who has switched from the camp of the cautious to that of the confident, decide to climb to the island's peak. They climb a tree to be the first to spot the boat's arrival, but see nothing. That evening, during dinner, both die within a few hours right before everyone's eyes.

The day after the burial, the sky clears and the supply boat finally arrives. Guè desperately tries to signal to the men on board to stay low, but his gestures are mistaken for a festive greeting. Having landed, the men find only four survivors—Guè, Carlito, Marcela, and little Veronica—and are left bewildered seeing Carlito stubbornly walking on his knees and the remains of the villagers showing no signs of violence or visible symptoms of disease. Guè tells them a version of what happened—a mysterious epidemic, his desperate care for the children—but remains silent about what he has truly realized. That night, as new clouds gather in the sky, Guè watches the approaching storm and whispers to himself, "The rain"—realizing that the rescuers are not dying because the water from the sky cleared the air. He chooses silence. The surviving children board the ship taking them back to the mainland, while the island, with its graves and broken radio, recedes and vanishes into the horizon.