Allard
“I can’t tell if they stink worse than when they were alive.”
Allard sets the feet of the goblin he is dragging down and readjusts the kerchief covering his nose.
“That’s,” Momo pauses, narrowing her eyes as she thinks, “a little worrisome. Why wouldn’t they smell worse if they are decomposing and moving around in the hot sun?”
“You have obviously not been around Goblins before,” he answers with a chuckle. The sun is blazing, not a cloud in sight, and the day has grown unbearably warm. He picks up the feet and starts dragging the corpse along the ground again. When they reach the section of ground with neat lines of raised earth above the fallen he sets the feet down once more and pulls his canteen from his hip to take a swig.
Momo does the same, then pulls her corpse into its prepared hole and uses the shovel to scoop dirt on top of the body. “I can’t say that I have. I imagine their lives must not be great if they smell that bad, though.”
"They don’t mind at all! It’s everyone around them that does. They tend to live on the outer edges of towns when they leave their homeland, so they're aware it bothers others. They stay away because they are unfailingly polite as a people.” He pulls his corpse into the open grave beside the one Momo is filling and rolls the body in. “It isn’t that they aren’t clean. They have a sort of symbiosis with these tiny bugs too small to see. The bugs eat the dead skin on them and in thanks secrete a kind of slime that keeps their skin moisturized and protected when living above ground. It’s the slime that stinks. Oh, it really, really stinks.”
“So you are wondering if the bugs move off when they die? Wouldn’t that give more dead skin to eat?” Momo waits until Allard is done, then takes the shovel back and starts to dig one more hole. Sweat drips off her face and her curls lay matted to her neck. They have been at the dragging and burying for over an hour already, and the sun has been relentless. Allard watches her worriedly, but she doesn’t appear to be flagging or showing signs of feeling faint so he doesn’t say anything about her needing a break.
She’ll take a break if she needs one, he thinks, watching as she tosses shovels full of dirt to the side. “I never thought about it before, but I’ve never had to drag a dead biter around before with nothing else to do but think. Their skin looks kind of dry. If the bugs were still there it would be shiny I would think. Maybe they need their host to be alive.”
Momo finishes the hole, longer than the last six and a bit wider, and deep enough that she needs help getting back out when she is done. Allard gives her a hand as she climbs out, then falls into step beside her as they head back to the village. He was never a big talker before meeting her, but Momo doesn’t seem to know much about things in the world, and he enjoys being able to explain things when he can. She reminds him of his mother sometimes. A quiet strength, and a confidence that shines in her eyes. Truly confident people don’t need to pretend they know everything, he has learned over the years.
“Momo?”
“Yes, Allard?”
“I was wondering. Why don’t we just bury the bodies where they lay?” He voices the question that has been bouncing around in his head most of the afternoon.
“At first I buried the bodies I found away from the village because the thought of keeping the bodies inside the village was unnerving for me. Then I met you and I started to think maybe it was a good decision anyway. Who knows what else might happen in the future? What if I need to expand my garden, do I really want to have dead bodies beneath my carrots?” She smiles at him and swings the shovel by her side. He would have thought she was having a rare moment of childishness if her head didn’t turn from side to side occasionally, looking for things coming close. “Now I wonder if I may not have gone out far enough. Once the fence is in place we will be able to see the graves from the outside of it.”
Allard nods, looking around and behind them. He convinces himself that he is being a good lookout, and not that he doesn’t want to see the ravaged body they are quickly approaching. “I guess it isn’t as far out as it seems when you say it that way.” He looks ahead and swallows hard. “But this person isn’t going to be able to be dragged. Shouldn’t we just bury them where they lay this time?”
Momo squares her shoulders and Allard feels her resolve helping to straighten his back as well. “That wouldn’t be right, would it? We have a nice little cemetery already, let’s let his body lay beside those who might have been friends and family for him.” She pauses and cocks her head. “It would suck if he knew some of those people and hated their guts. I wouldn’t want to have my burial plot next to some obnoxious so-and-so for eternity.”
A laugh pushes out from between Allard’s lips and he slaps his hand across them, then squeaks and moves the dirty, biter-dragging hand away quickly. “I guess that’s one way to think of it. I like the idea of having an area where all of their bodies and spirits can have company. But how are we going to do this then? We really can’t drag him…”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
They come to a stop, the body close enough to see details but not close enough that the smell is overpowering. Momo swings the shovel a few times, then crosses her arms. The metal head of the shovel bounces off of her hip softly. “I didn’t think about that. Guess there aren’t tarps lying around, huh?”
“I think there are!” Allard’s face warms when she looks at him with surprise writ clear on her face. “Sometimes we take- I mean we would take carts of produce into Yanniston to be sold, and there are a few thick tarps that we used to cover things.”
“Plastic? No, probably canvas,” she murmurs, her expression much lighter. Allard frowns at the unfamiliar term, but it happens often enough that he doesn’t bother to ask. “Let’s go back and get one of those, then we can kind of scoop him onto one and roll him up like a burrito and drag that.”
Allard wonders what a burrito is. Obviously, something made of plastic. Whatever that is. Unless his grasp of the context clues is wrong and plastic isn’t a building material. It could be a type of plant. His head begins to hurt.
He follows her around the body and between the houses, stopping when she does as they step into the central area. He looks around, then back at Momo who is staring at him quizzically. After a moment she stifles a grin and asks “And where are the tarps, Allard?”
“Oh!” He smacks his forehead, then winces when he realizes he hasn’t had a chance to clean off his hands. A little more dead goblin-biter dirt probably won’t hurt him, he reasons as he runs into his house and down into the cold room for the tarps. Luckily they are something he was responsible for since he was the main farmer and often rode into town to visit his father when produce was taken in for sale.
Momo nods when he carries them out, then leads the way back to the bloody mess waiting for them. “Did you know him?”
“What?”
She nudges the partially eaten leg of the human on the ground and Allard watches her. “He was coming straight for the village. He might have just remembered there was a village here, but I was guessing he might have been from here.”
Churning in his stomach warns Allard with enough time to run away a few steps before throwing up his breakfast. He props himself up with hands on his knees and waits to make sure there is nothing else waiting to be expelled, glad they had decided not to eat much for lunch before going out to complete their grisly task. He can hear Momo moving around, and he knows he should be helping her but the thought of looking at the mangled body makes his stomach turn again.
“I’m sorry,” he says, not willing to see how bad the disappointment is on Momo’s face. “I have seen people die I just haven’t-”
He stops talking and manages to halt his dead-biter dirt-covered hand before he wipes off the strings of bile from his mouth with it. He hears footsteps crunching in the dry dirt and rocks towards him, and then Momo’s soothing hand begins to rub circles on his back.
“There is no apology necessary,” she says, her voice low and calm. “Unless I've misunderstood something, your job was never to deal with this sort of thing before. But I could be wrong,” she adds with an impish laugh. “Maybe farming here is much more aggressive than I imagined!”
Allard chuckles weakly and stands up straight. “Thanks, Momo. Sometimes I just feel kind of useless. You can do everything, and I can’t even help you move a body, someone I couldn’t save even if I wasn’t hiding in my house at the time - OW!”
“You did exactly what you should have done, and I don’t want to hear any more about that,” Momo says, retracting the hand that has just smacked him on the back of his head. “Now come on. It’s hot, and we should try to get inside soon. We can work on the groundwork for the wall again tomorrow. Won’t do any good to have either of us go down with heat stroke.”
The smell is not as strong when they stop alongside the swaddled form. Allard frowns down at the shape that looks more like a rolled rug than a body. “Can I see their face? I promise not to vomit on them.”
“I don’t think they’re to the point of caring anymore,” Momo says, grimacing as she pulls the tarp down enough to show the top half of the man’s face.
“Oh,” Allard gently takes the thick canvas from her hands and covers the face back up. “This is Sam. He used to live here too. I don’t know why he would have been trying to return. Sam had a bad heart, and his health was starting to fail in other ways too. He barely made it to Yanniston, and I remember it was a week before he was strong enough to get out of bed after that.”
Momo begins to pull the rolled-up body along the ground, and Allard hurries to grab the other end so they can carry it instead. “It doesn’t make sense,” he continues, “things were bad when I left, but what could have happened to make it so he felt it was better to come back here?”
“Maybe he wanted to die in his home,” Momo says, looking over her shoulder to see where is she going. “I’ve known a few people in my time who have made that choice. That explains why he didn’t move again when he fell. If he had a bad heart, he might have had a heart attack. So he didn’t feel anything that happened to him afterward. That’s a reassuring thought.”
The sun is halfway toward the horizon when they finish and arrive back at the well. Allard waves off a fresh cup of water and shuffles into his home, smiling wanly at Momo before he shuts the door. Something about seeing someone he recognized, someone who might not have been a friend but was someone who he saw every day for most of twenty years, is causing his heart to sink into turmoil.
I wish I was strong like Momo, he thinks as he sits down in his chair and stares at his closed shutters. She tells me to just be myself, and it’s okay to not be tough. But I’m an adult, I should be able to handle things like burying dead bodies.
He slumps down in his seat and runs his hands through his long hair. I’m not going to let her do everything by herself anymore. There has to be something that I can do to help. What if the next person that dies is a friend and I could have done something? And why did Sam leave the safety of Yanniston?
The sun sinks behind the houses opposite and the room grows dark. Allard carefully makes his way to the water bucket by the door and drinks the last of it.
There has to be something. What else can I do besides grow crops? That’s hardly useful with Momo and her plant skills. There has to be something that would help us, help her so she can relax more.
But what?