New Flash Fiction: "Mummy"

Happy Halloween!

Mummy

Winding sheets. We’re not hung out on a line, not like the freshly washed ghosts. That’s not us, we can tell you.

No, we wrap him up. We feel sorry for him, of course, because he died for love, but that makes no difference to what we have to do. We have to work. Dipped in resin, dry and hot, let us work on him, turn him into leather.Once his entrails are gone, it’s our duty.

We felt his blood, when first we were plastered on. Felt the dust all those timeless years, five thousand, imagine, five thousand! You can’t, it’s too old, you can’t even conceive. But we’ve been here that long.

We felt the sun when the tomb was first opened, when the learned doctor of archeology brushed awy the gold leaf and we emerged. (It wasn’t our fault he soon after died a gruesome death - talk to the Canobic jars.)

So we emerged. Now we are still, untouched again, under the glass case, feeling neither dust nor sun but only sixty degrees, thirty percent humidity, like our far flashier cousins the illuminated manuscripts in the east wing. Much more grim, we are consigned to the basement of the museum, where the very little children are afraid to go, directly below the smiling Buddha in the gallery by the fountain upstairs.

The night outside is riot. Firecrackers and crazy fornication, like this poor soul we are wound around never knew, ghosts and sparklers in the streets, drink and smoke of sacred herbs. Above us, on the pavement, strolls the man who works with death, like us - young, tall like no man was in our time, skinny and pale-skinned (he could never be turned into leather, too waxy), with the knots in his neck from bending over his work with the dead, slicing and dicing to explore how they met their reaper.

A young man, you would think, who is very familiar with us - and he is. But even he won’t come down to the museum basement tonight. Even he will take his girl over the town, over the yard full of graves, which are more known to him. He doesn’t want to look the least bit afraid in front of her.

All around him, we’re dancing, vibrant strands, electric in the night, blue - but it’s not us, after all, only people like him, dressed up in us, wound up like this man, our charge. Trying to hold back death by laughing at his jingling skeleton.

We couldn’t do it, hold back death. We’re only strips of linen in resin. We have no magic. We couldn’t keep him alive. Did we fail in our duty? He had a wife, a child, a goat. He has none of those things now.

We can’t emphasize this enough. Take it from us. We know. It’s a fool’s quest, to try to avoid death.