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TERMINUS
After the attack, the dead are displayed on tables. Given the need for pity rather than terror, the remains have been tidied, prettified. No broken heads, no eviscerated torsos. Nothing mangled. Leg stumps as cleanly cut as rolled beef roasts. Our leader holds his stunned head between his hands, and we file past and out into wintry sunlight where our paths fan out and none of us look back. We walk away from the dead, away from the euphemism of "the remains," as if the husk of the dear departed were a rococo grotto, a charming ruin set in an English garden, dripping moss, tangled eglantine and all the rest, much as the guidebook describes. My road becomes a lane, a track over meadows and through woods, and I come to the big tree, the tree with staircases, windows, doors. And then? And then? The story opens up when a stick-thin woman thrusts a swaddled thing into my arms and waves me away. And then a boy holds out a tray of live shellfish, blue shrimp, purple squid, and the child I carry grasps a green salamander and bites off its tail, a tail that will grow again and come back to judge us when our own time arrives. So. Beyond the woods, the ground rises to a spine of rocks. Steam pants from the fractured dirt, pools of hot water amid patches of snow. Beyond this ridge there is nothing, nothing but blank cloud. And I stand at the brink, hugging the unwrapped child, gazing into the pale gray of heaven.
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