Burial: A Handful of Earth

Note to Readers: This standalone short story is also included in the complete edition, The Reed & The Flame: A Collection of Short Stories of Faith and Endurance. If you already own the complete collection, you already have this story! Looking for the full journey? You can enjoy this story on its own or get all ten stories together in the collected volume.And if I saw any of my nation dead, or cast about the walls of Nineve, I buried him.In Nineveh, under an Assyrian king shamed abroad and hungry at home, the murdered dead of the captive people are left where they fall — along the walls, in the low ground by the tanneries — for the birds and for the warning. To bury them is forbidden, on pain of death. It changes nothing: the king does not notice, the wall does not come down, and for every body given to the ground, more appear.One man goes out anyway, night after night, with the one tool that is also his living, and buries them. He is no one — a brick-maker, a foreigner, a nobody history would never record. He cannot say why he began, only that something in him, at the sight of a stranger cast along the wall, simply stopped walking. And slowly, across the years, the burying costs him everything he has — his livelihood, his home, his standing, the trust of his own son.After Tobit, The Burial is a spare, nocturnal short story about the dignity of the body and obedience that looks like futility from every practical angle — a costly, repeated mercy done in the dark, for the dead who cannot thank him, in a city that will never know. Story seven of The Reed & The Flame, a new collection from the author of The Candle.