Weekend Writing Warriors: Homecoming

It’s Sunday, and time again for Weekend Writing Warriors (click on the logo above) and snippet Sunday (click on the logo below. Both blog hops involve authors posting 8 sentences or less of their work, anywhere from first draft to published. Mine for this week is from a published work, Homecoming, available from Amazon or Barnes and Noble in a variety of formats.

Last time I quoted from Homecoming I covered Marna’s discovery of the mummified body of a plague victim and her immediate response. Here is the follow-up to that discovery. I’ve done a little creative punctuation to get it under the 8-sentence limit.

Logic said she should get away, that the person was long gone and the body might still harbor the plague.

She could not abandon the remnant.

The body refused to be composed into any semblance of rest, but she brushed away the last of the sand and carried it into the sun, now high in the sky. Deaths among the R’il’nai had been rare, and she finally had to ask the computer for the proper words.

“I do not know who you are,” she told the body finally, “so I cannot speak of your life and the joy you brought those who knew you. I can only say the final farewell. Take the goodness and joy of your life with you as you go before, and let all sorrow and evil be consumed with your body in the furnace from which it came.”

She reached out to cup her hands around the skull-like face, locking her mind on the body; then she gathered herself mentally, reached for the sun, and thrust the body into its nuclear heart.

Funeral rites of the R’il’nai.

Jarn’s Journal Year 3 Day 92

They bury their dead.

It seems terribly messy and unhygienic to me, leaving their bodies to be eaten by burrowing animals and worms, but they dressed Storm Cloud in all her shamanic regalia, wrapped her in a tanned antelope skin, and lowered her body into the pit they had dug. Then each of her descendants filed by the pit to add some small offering—mostly foodstuffs—before they filled in the pit with earth. I gave her the shell I had found by the sea.

By their beliefs, they are honoring her, just as we honor our dead by teleporting their bodies into our sun. It seems very strange to me, but our ways would clearly be impossible for them, and they must dispose of bodies in some way.

I teleported back to the shelter when the funeral was over, both to update this journal and to think. Does it make sense to stay here? I know now that this is beyond the range over which the People normally wander, even in good years. Would it not make more sense to move the solar panels and the computer to the vicinity of the lake? It is not quite as stable as here; the lake is in a rift valley. But I can perceive magma rising, and surely I could avoid eruptions.

Rain Cloud has told me that while they very the exact site of the gather, it is always somewhere along the shores of the lake, and if I chose to have a place there, they would find it much easier to locate me. He even suggested that Meerkat, who no longer has a group and cannot live by herself, could serve me. I am not so sure about that.