The summer’s heat was known to bring solids to liquids, ice to water, clots to running blood. On that day in August 1904, the Tsarina felt a turning in her stomach. She gripped her womb, and called to her husband and their maids. They whisked her to the nurse’s room, following each other like a flock. A triumphant look fell on all in attendance when the glowing baby’s head squeezed out of the exit. Tsar Nicholas II was the first to notice the baby’s sex. A boy. With his head against her breast, Tsarina Alexandra stroked the naked back of the boy who would be king. But when the nurses cut the tsesarevich’s umbilical cord, tragedy struck the empire. The blood wouldn’t stop. His mother wept at his state, covered in the sanguine liquid like a calf fixed for sacrifice.

By now, the announcements had already been made. “Alexei Nikolaevich: An Heir is Born!” read the headlines plastered on banners around St. Petersburg. The people rejoiced in the streets, meanwhile the subject of their joy lay covered in the bloodshed from his navel. Another royal son, tainted with the curse of hemophilia, left to waste all the royal blood like a leaking chalice plated with gold. 

Eventually, the boy was patched up, and the Tsarina held her baby, clean of all redness, and nursed him. She spoke to her son, “My sweet Alyosha, your mother will protect you. She will. Your father too, and all the doctors in the world, so that you shall live and thrive like our family has always done. You were your father’s one wish. I will never let you go.”

The summer left slowly, and the boy was of the age to hold his head up on his own. Still, he was carried everywhere. The thought of him falling on his face, trying to stand, only to let a small scrape be the catalyst to his demise, was too much of a risk. His siblings were instructed to play calmly around Alexei. He grew up as a doll. By the time he reached seven, he gathered the confidence in himself to walk without an attendant by his side. Alexei wondered why his treatment was different. Why he drank multitudes of medicine and his siblings did not. Why couldn’t he ride the train? Why was he confined to his room? And why, when his father would leave his side, he’d give him a strange look and then scoff to himself as he walked out the door?

He learned to accept the treatment. He knew he was sick, and his siblings did too. However, that didn’t stop the shame from creeping up his shoulders, and culminating in his joints. The aching pains around his ankles and hips became debilitating. Even so, he remained stoic, remembering his father’s words: “Alexei, you mustn’t let your sickness take you down. If it controls you, it will control the empire, and when you take on my role, you will realize how important it is to stay strong.” The illusion of strength is a skill seven-year-olds don’t often learn to procure. 

On a day like his birth, hot with summer’s thrust, his sister barged into his room and whispered into his ear something harrowing. “I overheard father and Dr. Rasputin talking. They say you may never have children. I thought you should know.” The internal bleeding had concentrated around his groin and the threat to his approaching manhood stilled him. With these words, Alexei sat up in his bed and wondered about what the future was like. He itched the bandages around his elbows, and followed his thoughts to some far future where he was king. He often thought about leading the royal life from his bed. If that was all there was for him. These images dwindled in his mind when his mother came with the nurses to tuck him into bed. She left him with the same words as always, “Goodnight Alyosha. I love you more than the stars combined.”

The Tsar tried his best to hide the politics from his children. However, his oldest sister always found a way to tell Alexei some of the latest news. Before breakfast, she’d run into his room, lay her head by his and tell of the glories and horrors facing the empire. One morning, she revealed to him that on her latest trip to the countryside, she saw a boy about the age of himself, dead by the train tracks. Because Alexei was so quiet, she felt like she could tell him anything. “I can’t get the image out of my head. He was so young and just covered in blood.” Alexei consoled her with a soft kiss. When he was alone, the thoughts sprang up again. Since he was so far from the bloodshed in the empire, he only assumed that the fallen boy by the tracks died of the same illness he had. 

He pictured the boy fed up with solitude, covered in similar bandages and aching with similar pains. Him thrashing against his mother’s grasp and fighting his father with angered words. He imagined the boy freeing himself from the gauze around his waist and running to no end. He pictured him racing across the fields like he was saved. The freedom he must have felt! Alexei smiled to himself.

The visions continued as he traced the boy searching for paradise. But when it was time for the boy to fall, Alexei could not bring himself to design such an image. He extinguished the reverie, and in the way young boys create figments in their mind, he drew an alternate reality. One where the boy by the tracks kept running, filling his lungs with the air of freedom. 

The final moments of his life were not too far from the world of his daydreams. Since those days with his sisters, he had been fixing a future for himself in his mind. He conceived magic. The sprawling canyons he would cross one day, the kingdom he would rule, and the lovers he would seduce laid like a palimpsest beneath the mundane days. But when the Romanovs were rounded up, pressed together under their mother’s breast like a litter of puppies, the future finished him off.

On July 17 1918, Alexei’s family met their fate together, crushed under the anticipated rebellion. His mother used to fear the day she’d stumble on her son, fallen in his chamber, only a pool of blood in his place. However, their royal blood spilled anyway. It congealed and clotted under the summer’s heat. As Alexei faded with his family by his side, he remained the strongest out of all, knowing the threat of bloodshed like no other. Perhaps, this moment of death was his turn to run like the boy by the tracks. Completely fulfilled, as if he had been saved.