This close to the territory of death, all of those tombstones, planted flowers raising up, decaying flowers laying sideways, she felt a certain kinship.

She wondered about the first time someone had needed a graveyard—not just a burial ground for family, but something larger, for members of a community, village, church. It must have been a moment like this, a deluge of bodies, dead in some mysterious way.

Otherwise, everyone could do what she had done, handle their own dead. An article crossed her mind, she thought it was Tricycle magazine, a story about Buddhists cleaning their dead and Hindus floating their flaming beloveds’ corpses into a sacred river on pyres. Perhaps it was a whole issue on death.

She paused, propping herself up with a foot on the curb, to make a note to research this. There were many notes like this now, starred questions and directives. It was satisfying to know that some questions had answers, some tasks could be completed.

She cut into the cemetery at the gate, biking between the stones. Yes, she thought, a public graveyard would have to be a mathematical imperative. War, plague. She thought of the bone border in Palestine, where the Israelis had had to relinquish so much territory under international pressure, but refused to let the Palestinians gather the remains of their warriors from the seventy-four-year occupation. The same thing was happening between the US and Mexico. She couldn’t see how war today was any less barbaric than Europeans placing heads on spikes, or the genocidal ashes in Germany that left behind piles of shoes and watches and dental fillings. Piles of skulls in Rwanda, Khmer Rouge; the Parisian catacombs. Dune wondered if the source of destruction mattered once you could build structures of skeletons.

When would this place be ready for catacombs? The city was already somewhere between an emergency room and a graveyard.

She coasted out of the cemetery, heading towards the checkpoint on Jefferson. People crossing out of the city there were heading north along the water, to drive west across the state, or keep going to the Upper Peninsula, sometimes to continue over into Wisconsin.

Moving between the houses, she was struck by how, even in the onslaught of death, humans protected their belongings. She wondered if it was an act of resistance—you might take our bodies but you will not take my television. Or my couch.

It seemed so ridiculous to her, to see the houses boarded up daily. Who cared about these things, if you got to leave, alive? If you got the great blessing of driving away with your loved ones? She would leave it all for another hour with Kama.