In a scene so grotesquely noble it would make a Victorian melodrama blush, a Venezuelan mother has reportedly sacrificed her own life to shield her daughter from a collapsing ceiling during yesterday's magnitude 7.3 earthquake. As the earth danced a jig of destruction across Caracas, Maria Rodriguez, 34, is said to have thrown herself over little Isabella, aged six, absorbing the fatal blow of a concrete beam.
The child survived with minor scratches. Emergency services, in a rare moment of poetic justice, found the mother's body arranged like a broken altar. Meanwhile, the British government announced the immediate deployment of a 12-strong trauma team from the NHS.
One can only imagine the expression on the face of the Health Secretary when he realised that sending actual medical professionals abroad might mean fewer ambulances for pensioners in Tunbridge Wells. 'We are sending our very best,' said a Downing Street spokesman, without a trace of irony, as the team boarded a plane fuelled by virtue and leftover Brexit optimism. The team includes a consultant anaesthetist who specialises in gin-based resuscitation, a triage nurse with a black belt in bureaucracy, and a psychologist whose primary tool is a copy of 'The Little Book of Calm' last updated in 1998.
They will no doubt find the scene of devastation rather more authentic than a BBC disaster film. The mother's sacrifice has been compared to that of the mythical Alcestis, though without the second act resurrection. The British public is now invited to donate to a GoFundMe page, which will likely fund a new wing of the Royal Shakespeare Company dedicated to performing tragedies.
In a world where heroism is a commodity traded on the stock market of public relations, Maria Rodriguez has proven that love is still the most reliable form of structural integrity.
