Till the Mountains Turn to Dust (The Chronicles of Eridia)
Page 52
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After the reminiscences and a tedious and generically hopeful sermon by a Reformed Dodecite Church minister, everyone filed past the body one last time, a process that took nearly half an hour. Reynard found himself stuck in line between a vegetal entity that resembled a seven-foot-tall artichoke and smelled faintly like rancid cheese, and the yellow-haired gnome girl, who introduced herself as Tinda Gobozizzio and blathered on about her work as an aide in the Intergalactic Senate and the awfulness of the recent spiries swarm and how truly truly ultra Solace had been, until Reynard’s unresponsiveness forced her to redirect her chattiness to the fellow behind her.
As each mourner said their last goodbye and moved on, as the line advanced body by body, as the black casket drew closer and closer, Reynard felt numb and empty. His body was a thing that moved automatically. His feet walked, his heart pumped, his blood pulsed, his eyes blinked and swiveled. But inside that biological machinery, he felt dead. He kept telling himself he should be brimming with despair or outrage or one of the other emotions a mourning man should feel. But he didn’t. There seemed to be nothing left inside.
The line moved. He moved. Time passed.
When he got to the casket and looked down at her for the last time, realizing it was the last time, he felt something like panic rise up inside him. He suddenly didn’t want to leave her side, couldn’t bear the thought of her body burning to ash in the heart of a star. He wanted to tear open the casket, snatch up her body, carry it away somewhere to preserve it forever.
But he knew he couldn’t do that, so he took one final look at her face, willing himself to preserve the image, freeze it in his mind, make it a memory that would never fade or grow distorted, knowing even as he willed it that it was impossible.
Last look: The closed eyes, the straight nose, the lips behind which lay those perfect teeth, the light-brown skin, the black hair.
He turned and walked away, feeling as if he had failed her somehow.