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“I drag the body out into the snowdrifts, as far away from our shack as I can muster. I put her in a thicket of trees, where the green seems to still have a voice in the branches, and try not to think about the beasts that’ll soon be gathering. There’s no way of burying her; the ground is a solid rock of ice beneath us.

I kneel beside her and want desperately to weep. My throat tightens and my head aches. Everything hurts inside. But I have no way of releasing it. I’m locked up and hard as stone.

“I’m sorry, Mamma,� I whisper to the shell in front of me. I take her hand. It could belong to a glass doll. There’s no life there anymore.

So I gather rocks, one by one, and set them over her, trying my best to protect her from the birds, the beasts, keep her safe as much as I can now. I pile the dark stones gently on her stomach, her arms, and over her face, until she becomes one with the mountain.

I stand and study my work, feeling like the rocks are on me instead, then I leave the body for the forest and ice.”
― Rachel A. Marks, Winter Rose

“Did you ever bury thirty-five men in a place in back of your house,
thirty-five tunnel workers the doctors didn't attend,
died in the tunnel camps, under rocks, everywhere, world without end.”
― Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead