Burial Rites

Death happened, and in the usual way that it happens, and yet, not like anything else at all.

I could not talk to him without seeing his face. I could not trust his words in the dark.

Her body never took to the manufacture of children.

She and Margrét leave, but her words hang in the room behind her. You ought to feel the sun on your face. ‘Before you die,’ I cannot help but add, aloud, to the rustle of the embers.

Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another. There is only ever a sense that what is real to me is not real to others, and to share a memory with someone is to risk sullying my belief in what has truly happened.

here, bruises, blossoming like star clusters under the skin, black and yellow smoke trapped under the membrane.

‘Do I remember?’ she repeated, a little louder. ‘I wish I could forget it.’ She unhooked her index finger from the thread of wool and brought it to her forehead. ‘In here,’ she said, ‘I can turn to that day as though it were a page in a book. It’s written so deeply upon my mind I can almost taste the ink.’

I dreamt of Natan. He was boiling herbs for a draught, and I was watching him and running my hands over the smithy’s turf wall.

My throat closed up with pain, and something else, something hard and inciting and as black as tar. I did not let myself cry.