Fifth Day

 

 

The dead do not go away.

I sit cross-legged on the flat stone, my naked body cold in the dawn wind that whispers through the stunted pines. Father Sun sleeps below the eastern horizon, but a soft blue gleam sheaths the world. I gaze out across an infinite vista of purple ridges. They twist across the land like knotted lengths of cloth. As I watch, the silver Traders of the Evening People—the last falling stars—fly down to bargain with Our Mother Earth.

All day I have been desperately lonely, missing my mother and father, my friends, and I fear loneliness. It is not Silent. Loneliness overflows with the wrenching cries of my own suffering and the suffering of the world.

For a time, I thought I might go mad from those cries.

Then I heard my name whispered. Softly. Barely audible.

The dead did not call to me from the underworlds, but spoke to me from the rustling pine needles. They did not gaze down upon me from the skyworlds, but smiled up at me from a bead of dew trembling precariously upon a blade of grass.

They told me I have never been alone. Not for one instant.

Every soul is a thread in the fabric of the world. All I must do to see my relatives is gaze into the shining water that sleeps, and the grasses that weep. The Dances of the dead are motes of light, their voices sighing rocks.

My loved ones are all around me.

As I turn to face the east, I see the dead in the light that is coming alive. They climb over the rocky horizon like a sparkling golden tribe, and run across the face of the land, ruffling the grass, playing in the swaying pines.

I shiver and wonder at my own blindness.

Death is a silent, attentive partner in everything alive.

Of course the dead do not go away. They are the cloth that binds up the wounds of the world.

… My wounds.