The day of the funeral service, Lorien had entered into St. James Cathedral, filtered through a dark haze of people all sweating in their summer black. The carvings on the walls—she had never noticed them before. They were intricate beings overlaid in bronze, arching over the living, holding arcane symbols, instruments and scales. She had been swept inside and had walked a lonely course down the aisle, in strange union with the whispers and turning heads, that vast mystique of death and that of being the one left behind. That is how she had come to feel, left behind. Of all the things she had thought she’d grasped within her small scope of clarity, all the realizations she had collected against her parents, the blatant ignorance of her father, the frailty of her mother, they still had this on her. They had come to die, to know something beyond her young immensity, even if it was to know the end of knowledge; still their heads would soon be growing flowers out in the countryside and she was what remained—she was herself. She had not changed, not experienced the shift of atoms, that great return to the ground, in which one’s flesh became the earth, and the earth continued to spin and gape into blackness. Her flesh still overlaid her bones and dressed her for that day so that it was impossible for her to become unseen amongst the crowds, their squinting eyes, those statues holding instruments up to the amber rays of light. They were drowning in it, all of them, in the amber light. From the preacher, stiff-collared and asthmatic to the children inhaling dust in the very back rows, all were overlaid with bronze. She had taken her seat, unsure of how to place her hands, and pinned her eyes to the navy flow of choir robes whose sleeves began to rise, pulled by aging arms into the air. And after a steady dawning, the great hall began to echo with sound, became a small humming box within the wild urge and strain of the city. How it had echoed so—with the sound of navy robes singing.
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