Funeral Songs for Dying Girls by Cherie Dimaline

Author:Cherie Dimaline [Dimaline, Cherie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tundra Book Group
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

She finished and scooped me up. I let her lead me in the next song; I’d lost track of how long we’d been like this, holding each other, moving now and again. I was having trouble coming back from the story. And there was a new feeling, more shameful than anger, burning at the edge of my tongue. Was I jealous?

I tried to push the feeling away, so I danced away from her, swaying in the long silk and hilariously mismatched jogging pants as I stepped, mouthing the words I knew by heart, eyes closed because I couldn’t open them. I imagined her, standing by the turntable, leaning back on the shelf with that tight smile, waiting for me to stop. So I couldn’t stop. I moved my arms like the music depended on my conducting, like I was the tune itself. And when the sounds abandoned the rhythm, one by one, pinging off into the greater silence, I opened my eyes, facing the stereo and the shelf and nothing more. She was gone again. And I was more alone than ever.

Sleep was evasive, but I refused to fill the hours with anything other than a gentle swing in the hammock, counting the cracks on the ceiling until they jumped and snapped into patterns.

I once read a story about a man who grew a fig tree out of his stomach. He had joined the Turkish Resistance in the seventies but was captured and imprisoned in a hillside cave with two other men. In a show of power, or maybe just being lazy in their work, his captors tossed in a stick of dynamite, throwing the men against the walls, blasting a hole in the side of the cave. The man’s family searched for him for four decades, never knowing about the small fireworks that whisked him away.

Decades later, a researcher was wandering the mountains, taking in the local flora, when he noticed what appeared to be a fig tree growing on the side of a hill. He was intrigued; figs didn’t grow in this region. He approached and saw that it had followed the light and emerged out of a hole in the rock, directly inside an old cave with no entrance. He examined the tree, taking photos and drawing sketches of growth patterns and bark markings. Finally, perplexed, he decided to dig into its roots. There he found the skeleton of the resistance fighter, who had all those years before been imprisoned in the cave, but only after he had stopped to eat a fig, unaware that this was to be his last act of resistance. That seed in his stomach grew and, nourished by the decay of its host and spurred on by the spotlight of sun, had extended its woody arms toward the sky in one last, long hallelujah.

His family was so relieved to have found his grave, to know where his bones rested, curled fetal around the circulatory system of roots. I assume they

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