Hobbies of eternity

Having once misread a National Geographic article about mummies, Rory has been diligently preparing himself for eternity. His shirts smell of camphor, bitumen and nitre. His house is eclipsed by the shadow of the mastaba he paid the local scouts to build in his back yard. His ushabti stand ready.

Preparing himself for judgement and blessed Duat proved more difficult. In his garage, on the shelf at the back of his work area, are lined up the canopic jars Rory has filled with considerable effort and sacrifice. Modern tools are sharper than their ancient ancestors - Rory takes consolation in that.

Rory lies on the table he has added to his work area. A bright overhead light and a mirror on a cantilevered arm reflect a bright pool of light on his face. He contemplates the sharpened hook he needs to use to fill the last of the jars. A bowl containing a fresh poultice of sawdust, camphor and bitumen sits on a stand nearby. It will be an additional blessing to have clean sinuses, Rory reflects as he adjusts the mirror to show him his nostril.

Back in the house, Rory's gold and white linen clad high priestess Susan adds kohl to her eyelids with a fine brush. She hopes once Rory has finished mucking about with his mummification in the garage, he'll have the time to fix the tiles in the shower stall.

Persistence of umbra

After sunset the hunched shadows ride their bicycles home. They're easily seen against the dun and dark azure of the sky; they're almost invisible against the shadow of the ground. They shine little lights fore and aft to cast themselves. It would be a tragedy for a shadow to lose its lights, and so become indistinguishable from its bicycle or surroundings.

Wrong vision

One morning Arioch put the wrong eyes in. The night before he had inadvertently put down the glass with his eyes in it too close to the tray on his bedside table where he kept his pocket-watch, pounamu hole-stone on a string, verdigrine drachma and other assortments. In the cacaphonic scramble at the stupid o'clock alarm he ended up with the pocket-watch in one socket and the drachma in the other. It gave him entirely the wrong view on the world.

The owl of Athene was not his friend. Baleful omens surrounded him, mispelling his emails and chilling his coffee. He could not free his taste and smell of the lingering sourness of fur-packaged owl regurgitations.

The pocket-watch, unwound, made him late and staccato. His words, shorn of tempo, bewildered and even offended those used to more fluid, tuneful statements. Towards the end of the day he even developed a nervous tick.

Vexing though the day was, Arioch considered the experience educational and decided to repeat the experiment with other combinations of eyes. The metallic chrome-green of the preserved tropical scarab tempted him particularly. He had always wanted green eyes.

The things inside the end of the world

We're all of us mere surfaces over structures. Our bodies as well as our personas. Skin, politeness, the reflection of incident light. We mistake these superficialities for realities. No wonder the things inside became jealous, wanted to share the limelight.

From where I sit the bone-tide is only a few hundred metres away. The sky over it is also bone-coloured, darker, like old ivory. It hungrily sucks the air to it.

Might air have bones too?

Splinters of bone jut from every surface that the bone-tide has touched: rigid explosions of jagged material, fractally sharp, as painful to touch as it is even to look at, or think about.

There are people there amid the spears and pickets of bone. They remind me of cordyceps caterpillars, far gone in parasitic submission to the fungus that has turned their bodies into fruits. Bones erupt from their skins, eyes, fingernails. It looks painful. But they are as immovable as everything else over there. Their skins are bone. So is their hair, and clothes, and mobile phones. Their suffering, if they are still capable of anything at all, is as passive as it is eternal.

The tide is moving. The keys under my fingers are becoming prickly. Sharp. I can feel my bones ache, desperate to be free.

It won't be long now.