Weekly Writing – March 11 2023

“It’s all right,” she told him. “It doesn’t hurt.”
He squinted more closely at her than most did when she said that sort of thing. Most, when she said it, leaned back in relief, smiled in faithful praise. Turned whatever sympathetic tears they had been about to shed to the heavens.
Of course it didn’t hurt. Of course it shouldn’t – someone fulfilling such a sacred, blessed, unavoidable duty ought to feel only bliss. Clearly, praise be, the gods looked after her when she stepped into the flames.
He was the first person who ever hadn’t quite looked as though he believed it. How cruel of him.
Cruel to look at her with doubt and real pity, when they both knew it couldn’t change anything. Even if he asked again and she let a tear slip, let the truth slip, the only difference would be how much guilt he carried as he watched with the rest, as she walked into the furnace they’d made of the great, empty granary.
He had to know. In the end, even he had to let go. Lean back and let out a sigh, and his guilt along with it.
“If you’re sure,” he said, and the lilt in his voice hoped for her to be.
She smiled. She’d had longer to practise it than anyone would think, looking at her.
She stood at barely half his height. The crowd murmured and shifted around them, above her, like a field of ripe corn.
The crowd had already formed a semi-circle, closing in as close as most of them dared to come to the granary’s open door. Most of them shouted their thanks and hopes from a distance. Most didn’t want to look in her eyes – only he had stepped forward.
He stepped back now. Slowly, holding her gaze even once the crowd stood around his shoulders again. If she tried to run, to escape, would he help her?
It wouldn’t matter if he did. The rest outnumbered him, and some of them would have to be bold enough or guilty enough or hungry enough to toss her inside if she wouldn’t walk on her own two feet.
This way, at least she could walk at her own calm pace. This way, she was beautiful to them, with her long hair unbound down the back of her wicker gown.
With her feet bare, taking slow steps towards the heat. Even ten steps away, the skin of her face and arms felt tight with the heat.
Sparks lit like fireflies on the woven struts and juts of her skirt. The fire would undress her in seconds, and then everything would be pain.
Not for long. Just long enough for there to be nothing left of her – she had never seen what happened next, but everyone said they never found so much as a shred of bone, and the fire burst as she died. Up into the sky, burning itself out in a gout of sparks to outnumber the stars, blinding, but somehow, it would leave the granary standing perfectly whole and still, grey and cool.
And filled to the roof with wheat. Ripe grain ready for grinding and roasting, as if they’d had a golden, glorious year for growing, not the short, wet, hungry summer that had actually just passed. They would eat bread through the winter, and then, the most important thing, they would plant some of that wheat back into the fields.
They would have at least a few years of good growth from it, no matter the weather. And one day, out in those rich, ripe fields, lying curled up in the wheat like an egg in a nest, they would find a little girl who looked exactly like her.
Though a little younger. They would lead her into the village, this girl who looked only three or four yet knew all their names and words and customs already, and raise her again for the fire.
The hem of her skirt burned towards her. Forever?
Would they keep raising her and asking her if it hurt and watching her walk into the fire forever?
The doorway roared in front of her, dancing with every shade of orange too bright and beautiful to see and live. Licks of flame like strokes of paint anxiously layered, stripped away, remade, like something an artist couldn’t quite get right.
Maybe they would soon. Maybe they were trying to figure out a better way.
She could only hope. Because she’d had longer than any of them knew to practise not screaming when she took that last step forward, but it doesn’t hurt burned away from her tongue as the dress did from her body, and she never heard their gasps of wonder at the sparks or sobs of joy at the sudden plenty over the roar of the flame closing in to call her a liar.