Member-only story
Eternal Life, the Burlesque, and the City of the Dead
What more could you want than to leave nothing behind?
Their Heads were Missing
Along a wall soaked in sun, dead bodies lay in a neat line. Dry bundles of bone stuffed into white plastic-coated sacks, tied together at the top like a hobo’s bindle. Prized out of the graves they had hoped would hold them until the resurrection, these people now waited for me to clean them. Armed with a toothbrush and a plastic basin of water, it was my job, as an archaeology student, to carefully wash off the mud and soil that clung to the crevasses of femur and scapula, ulna and vertebra.
Bones don’t look like people. Not when they’re bundled into a bag. But skulls have faces, and faces have eyes, or at least lightless holes where eyes used to be. Still, as I opened one sack after another, I didn’t find a single skull.
Underneath the world’s biggest church, there’s a whole city of the dead.
The Romans were like that. They built houses for their dead relatives that looked exactly like the ones they lived in. Decorated with frescoes and murals and mosaics, with doors and windows and sometimes even multiple floors. Families would visit with food and wine they would pour down…
