Elephants and Corpses Read Online Free Page B

bones.
    He searched his long memory for some other way to rouse her. He turned her onto her side and pounded on her back again. Water dribbled from her mouth. He thought he felt her heave. Nev let her drop. He brought both his hands together, and thumped her chest. Once. Then again.
    Tera choked. Her eyelids fluttered. She heaved. He rolled her over again, and pulled her into his arms.
    Her eyes rolled up at him. He pressed his thumb and pinky together, pushed the other three fingers in parallel; the signal he used to tell it was him inhabiting a new body.
    â€œWhy you come for me?” Tera said.
    He held her sodden, lumpy form in his own plump arms and thought for a long moment he might weep. Not over her or Falid or the rest, but over his life, a whole series of lives lost, and nothing to show for it but this: the ability to keep breathing when others perished. So many dead, one after the other. So many he let die, for no purpose but death.
    â€œIt was necessary ,” he said.
    *   *   *
    They crawled out of the basement and retrieved Tera’s sister from the stairwell. It hurt Nev’s heart, because he knew they could only carry one of them. He had to leave his old form. The temple was stirring now. Shouting. They dragged her sister’s body back the way they had come, through the latrines. Tera went first, insisting that she grab the corpse as it came down. Nev didn’t argue. In a few more minutes the temple’s guards would spill over them.
    When he slipped down after her and dropped to the ground, he saw Tera standing over what was left of her sister, muttering to herself. She started bawling.
    â€œWhat?” he said.
    â€œThe dead talk to me. I can hear them all now, Nev.”
    A chill crawled up his spine. He wanted to say she was wrong, it was impossible, but he remembered holding her in his arms, and knowing she could be brought back. Knowing it wasn’t quite the end, yet. Knowing hope. “What did she say?”
    â€œIt was for me and her. Forty years of bullshit. You wouldn’t understand.”
    He had to admit she was probably right.
    They burned her sister, Mora, in a midden heap that night, while Tera cried and drank and Nev stared at the smoke flowing up and up and up, drawing her soul to heaven, to God’s eye, like a body merc’s soul to a three days’ dead corpse.
    *   *   *
    Nev sat with Tera in a small tea shop across the way from the pawn office. The bits and bobs they’d collected going through people’s trash weren’t enough for a workshop, not even a couple bodies, but they had squatted in rundown places before. They could eat for a while longer. Tera carried a small box under her arm throughout the haggle with the pawn office. Now she pushed the box across the table to him.
    Nev opened the box. A turtle as big as his fist sat inside, its little head peeking out from within the orange shell.
    â€œWhat is this?” he asked.
    â€œIt’s a fucking turtle.”
    â€œI can see that.”
    â€œThen why’d you ask?” she said. “I can’t afford a fucking elephant, but living people need to care about things. Keeps you human. Keeps you alive. And that’s my job, you know. Keeping you alive. Not just living .”
    â€œI’m not sure I—”
    â€œJust take the fucking turtle.”
    He took the fucking turtle.
    That night, while Tera slept in the ruined warehouse along the stinking pier, Nev rifled through the midden heaps for scraps and fed the turtle a moldered bit of apple. He pulled the turtle’s box into his lap; the broad lap of a plump, balding, middle-aged man. Nondescript. Unimportant. Hardly worth a second look.
    To him, though, the body was beautiful, because it was dead. The dead didn’t kill your elephant or burn down your workshop. But the dead didn’t give you turtles, either. Or haul your corpse around in case you needed it later. And