Prompt: (* add: a body, old and mummified by the minerals in the water)
Have you ever seen a dead person? I mean a proper, once ‘live’, now dead person, a real body, not just TV pathology dramas or serial killer flix. Have you? I have. Too many to be honest. My job with the World Food Kitchen means I’ve seen a lot, lot, more than I wanted to or even feared might happen when I started doing this work. ‘This’ being helping to feed people in war zones, disaster areas, places of famine.
A dead body is diminished somehow though. The totality of what the person was before they died is less than after they cross that threshold. I’m not religious, indeed vehemently anti-religious and “the spirit has left the body” is mumbo-jumbo to me. And yet. And yet. The corpse is less of a presence than they were, only minutes, seconds before. Less of a heft. Maybe it’s simply down to less ‘pressure’. There’s no air in the lungs to bulk out the body, no blood pumping veins and arteries into bringing this human front and centre to you, the observer.
If I place them on scales, I actually doubt they’d weigh any less. But they’re definitely lighter. Less mass. An absence.
