Missing Scene

Years later, centuries, philosophers and scientists raise arguments both spiritual and mundane about the weight of the soul. Can it be measured? Does the body lose some definable weight at the moment of death? No scale has captured the phenomena, no firm proof for the assertion, and yet the tale lives on.

Jacob might have one day told those men of science and of faith how light his brother's body weighed upon him, how empty it seemed and how all its familiar smells had gone mute in the face of a colder scent of death, but in truth he did not notice. He simply carried his burden, now solely his own, as tears streamed down his face. Tears for his actions. Tears for his lost brother, and Mother. Tears, for he was afraid and alone and still knew so little. Mother, why couldn't you have told us a little more? What did I do to him? The thought, small and frightened and petulant, drifted into his mind and then out, quashed by the larger guilt and the stoic fixation on what he felt he needed to do.

The smell of smoke and flame rose to him now and then as he made the journey to the little cave. A distant part of his mind thought to wonder about the others, far on the other side of the island. His brother's people – Jacob had never thought of them as his own. He ignored the gnaw in his stomach, the sudden doubt of lost Mother, the suspicion that she had done something while he had looked away. And as Jacob began to doubt, he remembered, with the force of a great storm, her loss as well. He stopped a moment to sag under the weight of not just the body he carried and wept harder, his throat closing.

Shadows drew long behind him as he neared the end of his walk and the wind rose, crackling leaves and twigs. The sound seemed alien to him in the falling light, almost menacing mixed in with the familiar jungle noise, but it meant nothing to him as he placed his brother, gently, in the cave.

An hour later, accompanied by the same smells and sounds – oh, but the wind seemed to draw closer and the shadows ever longer – and Mother rested beside her favored son. Jacob thought it without bitterness but still weighed with regret. Anything to turn back the day's events. To embrace his brother and not strike out.

And with those thoughts came the new weight, far greater than the bodies. He was alone. The sobs came to Jacob harder, the sobs of the lost. I have to do better now. I have to do the best I can. I don't have anyone else now. He felt weak, a small life caught under a great duty, and his eyes fell to the dark, unmoving forms once more.

"Goodbye, brother. Goodbye," he managed through numb lips. He felt wrapped by the rising dark and the coming night. A sense of warm comfort that went suddenly cold as the dark became a deeper shadow drawing across him. Across the bodies. The fear began in his fingertips where he still touched his mother and brother and then fled up his arms, leaving stippled flesh behind. He went very still, the tears cooling on his stubbled cheeks, that familiar smell of linen and dark musk, oh so recently veiled by death, filling his nose.

"Hello," came the soft and so well known voice over his shoulder, and Jacob's stomach dropped. His eyes stayed fixed on the prone body of his brother, its silent face, and a strange sense of doubling built within him. He couldn't turn. Didn't dare.

A second later, that alien crackling sound, and the shadows drew away leaving the gentler night behind.

I am not alone.

Now, the wish fulfilled, it gave Jacob no comfort at all.