5.5. Questioning

Have you ever seen a dead body? 

Where I live, a building probably inhabited by hundreds of people,  there's a sort of superstitions: Whenever a person died, no matter the nature of their death,  the tragedy would always be explained as nothing more than the warth of the great one falling upon the head of those who sinned. The sins were never clear,  each end everyone created his own rules and explanation over why a person deserved his death in some way.

"He died from hunger they said,  but he was beating his wife after all." " The children died from famine? When they used to be eccentric " " Many died from the flu this year too....we might have sinned a lot.". Those type of conversations would buzz off like annoying flies, without a single clear explanation.  But it didn't matter,  because for everyone the warth was there and ready devasted whoever got a bit too close to the deathly place.

Whenever a  person died, the flor the inhabited would be systematically put into a fictional quarantine,  no one would come ou or come in, and everyone that unfortunately lived there would die too. Like the death, after having sucked one's life, felt obligated to take a few more. In the moment death came, going anywhere near it was a risk of dying as well. So subsequently, all believed that whenever the Great ones warth fell upon a person it would change into a dreadful malediction.

Whenever a person died, a rotten smell would spread around like a bad disease. For the unlucky who didn't live too far from the dead it was more than an awful smell. Some would get sick for breathing constantly the rotten air mixed with the constant mould fixed in the atmosphere.  They would say it was the malediction spreading and looking for a new victim, swiping it Sickel, oppressing your heart and lungs,  messing up with every each of your organs.

Whenever a person died many things would happen, and the mood of the buildings would get awfully heavy, until the cleaner finally came. Heaviness in everyone's heart would meet their paroxysms, although, in the bottom of their hearts, no one cared about the person death. After all they were just

scared of death, and in the end it was more like they were keeping their breath before meeting the end of their collective hysteria then from a great sorrow.

I could never really understand their behavior, from my young age I couldn't understand much about my elders' mindset. To me, it was all but weird behaviors and foolishness, but no matter what I believed or thought, nothing did change, the floor would still be cleaned,  all the residents still got to take the weird medicine given and everyone would still completely forgot about the 3 weeks of absolute pressures they lived.

Whenever a person died, it was like their existence was made to disappear. 

Whenever a person died the nature of the over human would be revealed. 

Whenever a person died I would feel atrociously disgusted. 

Whenever a person died, I would forget about them as well.

Then my friend died. I found myself standing at the doorstep, looking at their rotten bodies. My stomach climbing up my throat, releasing all its inside, burning my buccal canal already so damaged by the nauseous smell. It smelled like disease, like death, despair, fear, hopelessness, and terror, cruelty. How cruel it was, bugs eating them like they were no more than a rotten meat left abandoned. They didn't care about the life of the one they were eating, were they? I felt so mad, so mad, how could they? How could they destroy the body of someone who didn't do anything bad just for their own survival? How disgusting, how could they? 

I got so mad that I fainted, and when I woke up everyone called me mad.

In the end I was foolish, too curious to respect the death of a dear one, too preoccupied by my own sense of accomplishment to think about the humiliation they got even after their death. How foolish, I was so mad, so mad at the wrong person.

But I was still right, there were no malediction, after all, I survived, I achieved were everyone failed. I did what no one dared to do. I was the stronger one. Stronger than those who were afraid, stronger than the insect that was eating the dead, stronger than them who died pathetically without me even remembering their face. Were they female or male? What was their name again?

At the end even I forgot who they were. 

But then, have you ever seen a dead body?