9. Two Flash Fictions

Written for our final seminar with Maureen Freely. Burial is a rewritten fragment from a longer story, Spiderland. For the other, we were required to take an urban myth, rumour, or piece of apocrypha, and rework it.

Burial

The drops began to spatter the pavement with the usual rhythm, broken and dull; it would soon speed to a barrage. The street forked off, the sign on the left with the word for ‘museum’. It was at the end of the street, towering over the other buildings by virtue of an extra storey. Its only identifiers were the remnants of massive lettering on the whitewashed walls scarred with years of dirt and rain. I repeatedly pushed the door, then pulled it open.

The interior was no better: the cracked white paint was draped with cobwebs in the corners, the floor tiles were stamped with dirt. I dripped over to the booth, bought a ticket from the acne-plastered boy, walked through. The first room was lined with photographs, the captions plastered thick with the local language. There was – what? – some bored girl milking a cow, shoulders hunched resentfully; farms that even then knew what mud was. A field of rubble, a woman in a muddy peasant skirt picking through the demolished cottages, a dog next to her, mid-yap. How bizarre it was, that all these things had not merely come together for the picture, but been. The caption said 1943. I tried to remember whether the place was no smoking as I squinted. Then men swimming in a river, not far from the town, Red Army uniforms piled on the bank in the foreground. My grandfather’s pictures were different only in the insignia. It reminded me of the cover of Spiderland: the rippling, opaque water, the heads popping out of it, smirking like it was a happy coincidence they were in shot; behind them the stony bank, the cliff, the trees, stretching away into a white sky. I remembered wondering what they were like, these people with their bodies out of sight; ever-so-slightly out-of-focus, it looked like someone had simply found it, dredged up from the bottom of a box to be hemmed in by black borders. It was only later I found out Will Oldham, who had made the Palace records, took the photo; he’d grown up with the rest of Slint in Louisville, a backwater like this one, or mine.

The next room contained glass cases, misty with grease in the light. I could only half-glimpse some content: scraps of fabric, some the size of half a pyjama top, their wide stripes still visible, some almost tiny, ripped and muddied. On the shelf below, rusted pick-axe heads or spades without shafts, the caption-cards unreadable. One rag had a cloth triangle sewn on to it. ‘B’ for ‘Britisch’. Red to indicate a POW. I crossed to another case. Skulls, some with bullet holes in the back of the head, some with jaws missing, craniums cracked. Eye after hollow eye. Femurs, ribs, the odd dark mud-spattered beige they have before being boiled for display. On the shelf below, rusted razorwire. Bizarre to think they’d been below the hills and plain where we had driven, below stratum on stratum. I walked on.

Where does the past go? I thought.


Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum

The decision had been made. All of the Vatican procedures were in place, the bureaucracy dealt with: now all we needed was our saint. Being one of the novices handiest with a shovel, I was given the honour of helping with the exhumation.

The snow drove down on the cemetery of the convent; we had not been out to complete our chores for many weeks, as even our habits proved scant protection against the cold. We five trudging down the path were the only thing to be heard, the white landscape quashing any other sound. The grave was in a space off the path, bracketed by two stark naked trees clawing at the white sky. Standing huddled around the marker stone, we drew our cloaks around us as the wind picked up. Whilst Tomas, in the centre of the circle, tried to light the fire, it blew a thick sprinkling of white upon our backs. Setting a saint’s grave aflame is hardly a pious action, but we were in no position to argue with the labourers; if the Vatican saw things in a practical light, this nonsense would not be necessary. Not permitted socks, we crouched to have our skirts protect our ankles whilst we waited for the ground to thaw, the magic circle of the pyre spreading down and out through the powder.

The coffin was buried deeper than we had thought: some ten feet of earth had to be hauled out, the fire relit each time we came on another stratum of icy soil. By the time the coffin was exposed, we were tearing with gloved hands to avoid damaging the submerged casket. Brother Tomas and I demanded a prayer before they set about it with the crowbar; our imprecation to the Saviour was paralleled by the workmen blowing on their hands.

The sight the coffin-lid exposed was the strangest ever met my eyes. Á Kempis’ body was remarkably preserved, its flesh intact save for where the mice had been at it, stripping the skin from what had been the thighs. All else was leathered and shrunken, like something pulled from a bog. I must have been the first to glance down at his arms. They were in a state of disarray on his chest, quite apart from the cross of resignation, in which state, witnesses maintain, he was buried. Lifting the lid from where the workmen had placed, I could see snow clinging to indents streaking the surface. Scratchmarks. Brother Tomas, the most senior clergyman there, dared to lovingly lift the hands that had written The Imitation of Christ, and inspect the fingernails. Wood-fragments.

While he ran back to the convent, I stood over the pall-draped coffin. This was, he had said, No way for a saint to face death. I wondered how long he had been surrounded by that wood before life left him. Quite a while, I suspect. He had, I considered, followed his doctrine to the end. They could at least give him that.