Mummification
The desert took the moisture first, the skin contracting tightaround the scaffold of the bone, leather-brown and light,the body drying in the alkaline of the high-desert floor,a natural mummification that needed nothing morethan heat and wind and the patience of the sand.Mummified, the water driven from the flesh.Mummified, the body in its final meshof dried-out dermis clinging to the calcium beneath,preserved by accident in the desert teeth.The face is recognizable but shrunken on the skull,the lips retracted from the teeth in a permanent and fullgrimace that the living read as pain but is the simple physicsof the dehydrated tissue and the forensic heuristics.The hands are claws, the tendons dried to wire, the fingers bentaround the nothing they were holding when the spirit went,and the mummified remains will outlast the monumentand the civilization that produced the accident.They found one in the attic last year.Dried like jerky in the summer heat.Sitting in a chair.Facing the window.Waiting for someone who never came.—
The desert took the moisture first, the skin contracting tightaround the scaffold of the bone, leather-brown and light,the body drying in the alkaline of the high-desert floor,a natural mummification that needed nothing morethan heat and wind and the patience of the sand.Mummified, the water driven from the flesh.Mummified, the body in its final meshof dried-out dermis clinging to the calcium beneath,preserved by accident in the desert teeth.The face is recognizable but shrunken on the skull,the lips retracted from the teeth in a permanent and fullgrimace that the living read as pain but is the simple physicsof the dehydrated tissue and the forensic heuristics.The hands are claws, the tendons dried to wire, the fingers bentaround the nothing they were holding when the spirit went,and the mummified remains will outlast the monumentand the civilization that produced the accident.They found one in the attic last year.Dried like jerky in the summer heat.Sitting in a chair.Facing the window.Waiting for someone who never came.—