mostly in realms of physics that none of us could describe. Alive, she had intimidated me, but now, the both of us dead, alone, I saw nothing to keep me from entwining my transparent hands through hers.
In death, she was missing parts. A ring finger. The edge of her chin. Her entire left calf. Exhilarated to have found me, she caressed my cheek creating an overlap of ghostly essence. Cold, she whispered. Could she explain the science of this? I asked. No, she said as she showed me how instead she had learned to destroy the illusion of distance. A graceful gesture made with her diaphanous limbs opened a familiar portal. She wanted to take me back to her place, but I shook my head and pointed overhead at another star.
Benjamin, his wound still bleeding a carmine fire, had been a prodigy in languages, in architecture and archaeology, in cartography and semiotics. In this dead world, he had learned a new language by solemnly tracing old patterns in stone with his fingers. Following him, we charted the world’s ridges and contours, learned to set our hands upon its craggy surface, its burning skin, and discover its ripe old age. Though young, inexperienced, Benjamin possessed a humility, the value of which we only realized in death as we walked the world seeking not to conquer but to understand. Suddenly, we could hear the grumbles of the planet, aching from the weight of its empty civilizations, saddened by the loss of its people. We soothed it with whispers and pleas. We empathized only too deeply.
Susy and Lionel were sleeping in the belly of the beasts that had devoured them. We pulled them out, our hands clasping theirs to slip them through monstrous intestines, but their hosts seemed not to mind even as they exited the skin. Free, bearing a thousand puckered scars, Susy and Lionel demonstrated none of their old passions in biology, geography, ecology. Alive, they had gibbered madly, competed with one another, sought to possess knowledge through notes, studies, data. But now, shorn
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