Mourning

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The path stretched before her, its dusty surface a wound carved into the sullen wild grass. The question of where she was had dissolved into the briny morass of her twisting thoughts hours ago, the oppressiveness of the fog in her head in sync with the dreary, sunless sky above. Soft hills came and went around her path, rolling waves of green stretching to the gray horizon. Occasional mounds, crowned with weathered stones and stunted, tired trees, punctuated the empty landscape. Beyond that there was nothing save grass and its secretive whispers.

She continued on her path. Her nose wrinkled with a gust of frigid air. A slick, greasy scent of motor oil tried to force its way into her nostrils: the first smell she could recall experiencing in hours. The faintest of cries buffeted her ears, an all too human sob just audible above the whistle of the grass. Anxiety settled its electric web over the top of her mind, certainty that something awaited beyond the top of the next mound setting down roots.

For a moment she considered turning back, a sickening pit forming in her stomach as her legs continued to move forward without her input. In her head a silent, wordless thought floated into her consciousness: a need to witness the source of the cries. The notion that the thought did not originate in her mind only added the well-fueled engine of fear purring in her chest.

Mercy allowed the object of her anxiety to be brief. Cresting one last small hill a vague shadow on the road caught her eye, swaying back and forth with the rhythmic accuracy of a pendulum. At a distance she could pick out the contours of an emaciated, kneeling human frame, their face resting in their bony hands. Fear gave way to morbid curiosity as she approached, the figure’s ceaseless wailing catching in her ears with hooks of pity. That this person mourned over something she had no doubt, and so she allowed herself to walk faster until she stood only a few paces away.

She stopped for the first time she could remember. The kneeled figure rocked before her, their agony a flower, a beacon of emotion in the bleak world around them. Little remained of their clothes, or their flesh: only ancient remnants spared from the wastes of time by mere luck, held together by fragments of the heartiest threads and tenacious strands of sinew. And grief. Some odd, dream-logic sense of intuition told her that grief alone remained of whatever person they had once been.

She watched over their mourning. Watched as the corpse rocked and wailed over some pile of dust, punctuated with scraps of cloth. Winces danced across her lips with each hoarse scream of grief that filled the space, the coarse sound driven into her bones with the cold, uncaring relentlessness of iron nails hammered by an unpracticed hand. Despite the cries of pain she found herself without tears to shed. Guilt made its home in her lungs, guilt that her emotions had become as empty as the landscape around them. At the same time a sense of release grew within her, another wordless feeling that perhaps being witness to this long dead person’s mourning was all they needed.

With that thought in her head she planted herself next to the kneeled figure, warm pain stabbing at her legs from the path’s loose stones. Tentative at first she reached her arm around the rocking figure, resisting the urge to recoil at the cold, coarse texture of their ruined body. No words found their way to her lips, no empathetic condolences or affirmations: just silence. The figure sobbed on, their overwhelming grief now accompanied by an odd, warm sense of gratitude.

She watched over their mourning, held them, projected her condolences until the figure ground itself to dust upon the coarse path, joining whatever it had been mourning over.

And once nothing was left she moved on, soles crunching against the rocky, dusty path: wondering if she would too weather herself into dust walking its infinite expanse.

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