26.
 Still weak and in shock, Ramy-baba staggered around the table for a last look at her dead sister. Ramy's hands lay limp together. Her legs would never run again. Her eyes stared sightlessly into the sky, whose first tendril of light made her eyes glitter. Her face had a vacant, slightly shocked expression. Her tongue had turned from blue to black and hung fully extended from her red lips like a dark worm on the marble tabletop, where the mattress had slid aside during their love making.
Ramy-baba arranged the body, which was still warm, but cooling rapidly. First she used a long linen bandage to hold the burst organs in. She worked the body into the wedding dress and laid it on its back. She folded Ramy's hands on her chest and straightened Ramy's legs, and put tiny white slippers on the bare feet. She wept softly all the while.
Then she sat down and composed herself. She tried to listen to the sound of her heart, but there was too much rushing in her ears. She chose the knife with the two moons because it spelled hope. Still composing herself, she held the knife before her and stared at it in an effort to make it enter her torso more easily. She stared at it long and thoughtfully, weighing her sins and praying to the gods and goddesses who waited for her, most of all Ramy who had just become an ancestor-god.
The castle was silent as the bottom of a pond.
They would give her as long as she needed, presumably on order of Lord Ramyon. She was a non-person, half dead already. She sat for a time, testing the knife's heft, balancing it in one hand, then the other. Slowly, she brought the point to her belly.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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