Burial Rites

Her body never took to the manufacture of children.

Natan. He knew me as one knows the seasons, knows the tide. Knew me like the smell of smoke, knew what I was, and what I wanted.

In those early visits it was as though we were building something sacred. We’d place words carefully together, piling them upon one another, leaving no spaces. We each created towers, two beacons, the like of which are built along roads to guide the way when the weather comes down. We saw one another through the fog, the suffocating repetition of l

It was summer, and the light was tinged with pink.

Instead, I, I . . . I encourage her to speak of her past. Rather than address her, I allow her to speak to me. I provide her with a final audience to her life’s lonely narrative.’

He had rehearsed this speech as he rode to the farm, and he was pleased that he’d managed to remember to say ‘spiritual comfort’. It sounded paternalistic, and self-assured, as though he was in a lofty state of spiritual certainty: a state he felt he should be in, but had a vague, discomfiting sense that he was not.

those hidden bruises suggested something more – an end to the stifling ordinariness of existence.

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

and pray for forgiveness. As though prayer could simply pluck sin out.