Elephants and Corpses
Page 3
When he slipped down after her and dropped to the ground, he saw Tera standing over what was left of her sister, muttering to herself. She started bawling.
“What?” he said.
“The dead talk to me. I can hear them all now, Nev.”
A chill crawled up his spine. He wanted to say she was wrong, it was impossible, but he remembered holding her in his arms, and knowing she could be brought back. Knowing it wasn’t quite the end, yet. Knowing hope. “What did she say?”
“It was for me and her. Forty years of bullshit. You wouldn’t understand.”
He had to admit she was probably right.
They burned her sister, Mora, in a midden heap that night, while Tera cried and drank and Nev stared at the smoke flowing up and up and up, drawing her soul to heaven, to God’s eye, like a body merc’s soul to a three days’ dead corpse.
* * *
Nev sat with Tera in a small tea shop across the way from the pawn office. The bits and bobs they’d collected going through people’s trash weren’t enough for a workshop, not even a couple bodies, but they had squatted in rundown places before. They could eat for a while longer. Tera carried a small box under her arm throughout the haggle with the pawn office. Now she pushed the box across the table to him.
Nev opened the box. A turtle as big as his fist sat inside, its little head peeking out from within the orange shell.
“What is this?” he asked.
“It’s a fucking turtle.”
“I can see that.”
“Then why’d you ask?” she said. “I can’t afford a fucking elephant, but living people need to care about things. Keeps you human. Keeps you alive. And that’s my job, you know. Keeping you alive. Not just living.”
“I’m not sure I—”
“Just take the fucking turtle.”
He took the fucking turtle.
That night, while Tera slept in the ruined warehouse along the stinking pier, Nev rifled through the midden heaps for scraps and fed the turtle a moldered bit of apple. He pulled the turtle’s box into his lap; the broad lap of a plump, balding, middle-aged man. Nondescript. Unimportant. Hardly worth a second look.
To him, though, the body was beautiful, because it was dead. The dead didn’t kill your elephant or burn down your workshop. But the dead didn’t give you turtles, either. Or haul your corpse around in case you needed it later. And unlike the guild said, some things, he knew now, were not as dead as they seemed. Not while those who loved them still breathed.
Tera farted in her sleep and turned over heavily, muttering.
Nev hugged the box to his chest.
Copyright © 2015 by Kameron Hurley
Art copyright © 2015 by Jon Foster