To-morrow

To-morrow Peter Luo

My grandfather was a frail old man who did not have many words. He died at 74, what most would deem a ripe old age. He never was close with anyone, not even his own son. The whole town considered him a man who has fallen behind. In his mind, he lived with deities and spirits from an obscure time, and he told tales that no one could understand. Everyone, in and out of the family, has learned to disregard him, including my four-year-old sister Margaret. Thus, when he died, everyone was actually a little relieved to be saved from his blabbering. And Margaret, not yet knowing grief, jumped in excitement at the arrival of another funeral. On the second day of his death, my grandfather’s remains were placed on a wooden raft and flowed down the water of Mother Elga, the great river that encircled our small riverbank town. Deceased ones’ remains have been sent down this river since the beginning of my memory to be brought to where we call the Hall of Eternity. It is a place forever the season of harvest and Mother Elga flows not of water but of the sweetest wine. Where people could devour meat every meal every day. Well, at least that’s what people would hope to have, because meat is meager here. A horrible plague, almost like a deliberate curse when grandfather was only a boy wiped out almost all of our sources of meat. Since then, meat is only offered on a day of grieving-a person’s funeral. My father calls it “honoring the deceased properly”. Only on these days we allow ourselves to be a little extravagant. Thus, knowing a lot of people in the town is considered to be a “survival skill”, because then you could go around and attend more funerals than a normal person would and therefore get extra shares of meat. My great-aunt Dorothy was one such person who actually managed to die fairly rotund. My grandfather, in contrast, claimed that he never had a preference for meat even before the plague, he does not usually attend funer-