Mysteries of water * The walk home * Gentrification of death * Greeting the night * A new home

They say a child smells death, but I say children know nothing but hope. How could they know anything else? They haven’t learned.

Sheean knew we were close to home, knew it was close to dinner, knew her mother would be in the village center roasting a Bantha. She knew it, for that’s what she hoped. I let her run ahead. It had just been her and I for too long. It was too much silence for a child. The only noise for days was the flowing of water, which made Sheean laugh like she’d discovered joy itself. She rolled in the water for hours, and then watched it flow for hours more as I filled jugs, just to use my time.

“Will we ever come back, Father?” she asked me, as I dried her feet off, toe by toe.

And I shook my head no, just in case.

One mustn’t promise much to a child. Life already promises too much.

Then we made the walk home, which was twice as long as I remember it from when my father and I would go to the flowing water to bring tanks back, back before anyone knew how to make the wells right. Sheean wanted to talk, to tell me what she’d seen, what we’d seen. Every time I turned to her, her eyes were open and hoping. But I shook my head no and pointed to the quiet of the heavens. The whole adventure was an indulgence, talking would’ve been too much. Like the stars, I tried to make us still as we faded into the day.

My wife knew the Way, better than I ever will. And still she believed in indulging a child, letting Sheean see were the water runs since our child didn’t believe it existed, even though she heard the stories and visited it in her dreams. “She will laugh about this all when she is grown,” my wife told me, as she pushed me out the door. “Take her. Let her be a child. And you be a child too for a half a breath.” She laughed at me. Laughter is how life shows knowledge of the Way. My wife laughed often.

So Sheean had seen the flowing water and was so eager to tell her mother and nibble on some Banta with her little friends that she ran ahead. I didn’t stop her. I didn’t call her name. She was running home. What could be safer?

But the future is the same as the past; we know what we can recall. And suddenly I realized that my future was about to end. Then I ran too.

I found Sheean slumped over her feet at the edge of the village. The steam of afternoon skies twirling up toward the suns behind her. She was in a pile of herself, quivering. Too small for even her tiny shape.

For a moment, I thought she was hurt, injured in her eagerness to return home. But she was only crying. I lifted her, and she nearly fought against me, fought to make me hear her words. “They came. They came,” she kept saying.

“Who?” I asked once, then screamed as she struggled in my arms, “Who?”

“The magic,” she said. The word contaminating even her sweet breath.

I set her down and sprinted. I ran until death made me walk, for death was everywhere. Arms disconnected from legs. Souls loose from bodies. Stillness washing over movement. Swift bruises, more burns than cuts, cuts from focused light. It was the work of the Fleshie’s magic. And nothing could have been less sacred. Nothing more repulsive to the Way.

I couldn’t find my wife, and I’ll admit, I had hope, which is how I know I need the Way more than anyone.

I checked every body. Brothers, cousins, friends. My Father. All dead. All not my wife. And I hoped until I walked toward our hut and looked inside, and there she was. There was her body, her shell, her cage, collapsed over our bed. She was gone.

Magic had cut her away.

And I cried. In my shame, I cried alone.

* * * * *

Indifference is the most powerful force in the universe, and the only certainty. It is the one thing to remember at every birth, every funeral, every battle. Everywhere, all things flow and seep into darkness, yet we deceive ourselves by moving and seeing. All creatures are born to die. We breathe in only to breathe out. Indifference is the only truth. The only way to prosper is to live more and forget more. Remembering is worse than a curse. It is a weakness: The flesh’s vice. The Universe has no use for memory. Light spreads out only to disappear.

When I found Sheean again, she was staring at the two suns. “Please, father,” she said, searching the sky for a concession. “Let us bury her last.”

I told her then, for I had gathered myself, “When my father was missing, when I was sure he was dead, I remembered the Way. I did. Now, we can’t confuse death with life. What can she give us now?”

Nothing.

And saying that, I hid my weakness. And I did it for her. For I knew the terrible joy rotting inside me, joy that lingered from when I was a child. I woke up one morning and my Father was back with us, alive. He’d been missing for a week, dead to us that entire time. Then he was back, alive and speaking of a Flesh child. A Fleshie who’d used his magic to save him, like life mattered. Everyone laughed; my uncle, now dead too, even suggested that one of our children might do the same for a Fleshie. The men responded to that with the longest laugh I’d ever heard. Then silence and shame. For laughter is its own frailty.

Maybe, we’d forgotten the Way then. We’d ignored indifference and the shadows of the Fleshies and their magic. The evil of magic and its million tools are crimes in our Universe. They must be destroyed. For they cannot be ignored.

That is the truth of the Way: Mourn not the dead; instead, hunt the killers.

* * * * *

Death was spoiling those who slept, those who fought, those who turned to flee. Burial had to come fast. As we worked, I would not let my daughter look away; death would never change only decay, and the burns of a magic weapon cannot be ignored. The evil of its simplicity. The fineness of its power. If it weren’t for magic, all Fleshies would be dead. Even children must know that or vengeance dies with the dead.

We stopped only for water and to praise the night. And my wife’s slumped shell was still on our bed. Had she wandered there to end? Or was that where she was struck? Such questions begged madness, so I quieted my mind. Indifference is the Way.

My daughter did everything with tears. She was too small for much work and her eyes would drift toward the sun when I left her alone. So together we undressed the dead for their return to the earth. We covered them one by one until the suns could not find their empty shells. As we finished with one corpse, my daughter led me to another body that was not my wife. And I followed her the way one follows a child learning to walk.

Even horror has its end. And as the next night approached only the body of my wife remained. My daughter put my wife’s detached arm on her stomach and grabbed the hand that was still intact. I took the feet, and we walked her toward the setting suns. My daughter could not stop, so we walked her further, retracing our steps from our return the day before. When the sun was gone, we praised the night. And we slept there on the plains, my daughter, my dead wife and I, hours from where we had lived the life we’d known.

When we awoke, my daughter took the hand again and waited for me. I lifted my wife’s feet and realized where my child had to go.

We would be walking for nearly the entire day.

* * * * *

Water, as it moves, has a sound the blends into the Universe. And the hum of the flow, more than a mile away, reminded me of my daughter’s joy, my wife’s laugh. As we got closer, my tears wanted to join the water in rolling from its source towards an end. But I wouldn’t let another tear out. I needed its strength inside.

At the water’s edge, my daughter dropped my wife’s hand.

“Here,” she said. “Here.”

We stared at the suns together until silently she began to dig. I followed and we dug with every bit of ourselves we had left. We clawed at the ground as if we dreamt of creating our own river of sand.

And when the hole was large enough, we lifted my wife again and placed her in her new home.

“You are the last who will ever die,” my daughter said, as she reached for sand to cover the last sight of her mother. “After you, we will only live.”

I said nothing, for what does a child know but hope? For life has taught them nothing else. Indifference hides beneath it all, I want to say aloud. It is the shadow that speaks life’s truth.

Drawing by Jeff Hurlow. More Star Wars Apocrypha here. More Dosmasks stuff here.

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