Jeff Jackson - Mira Corpora

When I wake in the morning, Lydia’s not there. I climb down from the treehouse and race into the woods. I shout her name but the only answer is the echo of my voice and the screech of some startled birds. Instinctively I know she’s headed to Monrovia. I follow the blue spots on the trees, but I’m hesitant to go too far down the fog-obscured route. Before I return to camp, I spot the telltale signs. I kneel in the dirt and touch my finger to the series of her bitter-tasting droplets. The path to the dead village is marked by a fresh trail of blood.

We find the body at the bottom of the river. It has floated downstream and been snagged in the shallows by a dam of fallen twigs and branches. A teenage girl, lying there submerged, bobbing peacefully in the gentle current, strands of long chestnut hair mixing freely with the algae and underwater ferns. The first thing we notice: She wears a nondescript pair of fraying jeans and faded purple T-shirt. Second thing: None of us recognize her. Third thing: A rope is fastened smartly around her bulging neck.

It’s a clear case of suicide. Or maybe murder. Daniel figures the girl came to this remote sector of the woods to end it all in solitude, dangling herself from a branch over the river. Isaac thinks she was hiking into Liberia when some truckers intercepted her, maybe raped her, definitely strangled her. Nycette refuses to offer an opinion. She rolls herself a joint with trembling fingers and puffs away with fearsome determination. In her penetrating French accent, she keeps repeating the word “heavy.”

Nobody bothers to ask what I think. I stare at my watery reflection as it floats superimposed over the image of the girl. She’s flawlessly conserved in the cool current. Her lips a perfectly serene shade of blue. Her pink tongue protruding between her teeth, just so. Her eyes halfway open and unfocused on something they couldn’t see anyway. The expression on her face would seem sexual, except it’s too fixed to suggest any kind of desire. She looks beautiful.

The four of us hover on the banks of the river, everyone afraid to speak. Isaac finally announces that people at camp need to be warned in case the truckers strike again. Daniel counters that everyone is paranoid enough already and it’s irresponsible to panic them. They look to Nycette to cast the deciding vote, but she throws up her hands in exasperation. In the background, I pace the points of an invisible triangle.

It’s a stalemate. We leave the girl in the water and stare at her undulating corpse as if it’s an aquarium exhibit. Nycette anxiously braids and rebraids her blond dreadlocks while getting profoundly stoned. Daniel repeatedly pops the cartilage in his oversized nose, the only part of him that doesn’t conform with the suave pretty-boy image. Isaac sits cross-legged on a tree stump, wearing an expression so serious that his features seem squeezed into a single dot at the center of his bald head. I anxiously skip rocks several yards downstream.

Isaac is the one who breaks the silence. “So tell me this,” he says. “If we do keep it a secret, what the hell are we going to do with the body?” There’s another long pause punctuated by the plinking skip of stones. It’s Nycette who eventually answers. She exhales a fat plume of smoke. Her golden eyes are shining. “It is very simple,” she announces. “We will burn it.”

It turns out Nycette has done some reading about the rites and rituals of the Incas. According to what she remembers from a moldering anthropology text, the only honorable way to send off the dead is via funeral pyre. The flames release the soul from the cage of the dead person’s body. Set it free to travel to the afterworld. Greet its maker with a purified slate. Something like that.

Isaac rolls his eyes at Nycette’s spiritual talk, but this is obviously the perfect option. She reminds us that it’s small-minded to demean the spiritual traditions of esteemed ancient civilizations. Daniel suggests we start gathering kindling moss and fallen branches right away and reconvene tonight. He seems pleased about our secret and makes everyone swear a blood oath to return alone.

The last thing we do that afternoon is dredge the body from the bottom of the river. We wade up to our shins, stoop into the current, and each grab a limb. A cloud of silver minnows bursts from beneath the corpse and swarms our feet. We lift on the count of three. A one and a two and—. Waterlogged and rigor-stiff, the girl is heavy as a slab of stone. We heave her onto the grass. Her inert body looks as incongruous as the sculpture of an anchor displayed on shore.

When I return that night, the fire is already a thick column of light. Daniel stokes the white-hot embers and slots several plank-like pieces of wood across the top. “This is going to be good,” he keeps repeating to nobody in particular. He pulls his black mane into a ponytail and promenades around the blaze, surveying it from every possible angle. It’s unclear whether he knows what he’s doing or is simply excited to be in control.

Nycette smokes an extra-thick joint. Her pupils are tiny buoys of blackness in a sea of glitter. She stands over the body, confidently preparing the spirit inside for its journey to the heavens according to a set of half-remembered precepts. “We name her Mama Cocha,” she says. “We give her the name of the Incan sea mother.” She solemnly drapes her own shell necklace around the girl’s swollen throat. It almost covers the purple ring of clotted bruises.

Isaac stands with his back to the fire. The rippling shadows make his features flicker like an old tube television caught between stations. “You’re really okay with this?” he asks me. There is something unsettling about the ceremony, but I don’t want to break rank with the group. So I shrug my shoulders and act as if none of it really matters.

Time to put the body on the pyre. Isaac refuses to touch it on the grounds that he’s decided this whole idea is totally sick. So Nycette and Daniel hoist the corpse between them. They look queasy wrapping their fingers around the clammy, bloated limbs. The fresh air has accelerated the decomposition process. The body has pickled and the skin has started to suppurate. The mottled flesh is inhuman. They awkwardly swing the corpse back-and-forth to gain momentum. They toss it atop the fire.

It rolls off. The body lies face-down on the ground. Daniel and Nycette pick it up again, trying not to seem distressed. They get a firmer purchase on the arms and legs. Choose a better angle of approach. Pitch the body with more force. But it takes three more tries before the dead girl lies on her back atop the pyre. Her empty face stares up at the blinking stars. Flames conflagrate beneath her body, separated by only a few wooden planks. It’s a breathtaking sight. The girl looks almost majestic. I think that claptrap about the spirit might be true after all.

Then the stench. As the flames blacken the boards and catch the corpse, they unleash a consuming odor. A mixture of the raw and the curdled: Overripe fruit and mold spores; singed hair and meat rot; fresh blood and smeared shit. There’s a perfume-like undercurrent, a sweet tang that’s briny. It’s the sort of smell you can only fully register in the back of your throat as you start to gag. I smother my face with my shirt and retreat to the edge of the clearing.

Isaac screams: “Somebody take the body off the fire.” He hops in a mad circle around the flames, trying to leap close to the pyre without getting burned. Panic blurs his features and there’s a horrified glaze to his eyes. “C’est impossible to stop,” Nycette says. “Her spirit is still trapped inside.” And it really is too late. The girl’s body is completely charred. She’s a glowing cinder.