prompt: bank, title: earthly remains in misc. flash fiction

“Clearly,” the lecturer pointed at the projection of the photograph, “it was a holy site for peoples’ of its time, though the fact there seems to have been two competing groups with differing ritual supplications present within exact same frame of time will likely always obfuscate our ability to parse out their meanings.” The lecturer sighed. “With the evidence at hand, we cannot separate out which group’s activities was which in any way beyond the fundamental differences in their primary sacrifices. Next frame, please.” A technician at the back of the room changed the slide.

“Heading up the south bank of the site, and I apologize if some of you find this gruesome, but it is history after all,” a line of only partly-preserved but mostly in-tact human corpses frozen in the snow, “are the likely more dominant group’s tribute to their god, gods or goddesses, what have you: human sacrifices. Worshipers or perhaps captured members of some outside group, we can of course not tell if they were willing or unwilling participants, left to die of exposure as offering to their divinity. Barbaric, of course, but clearly holding some fundamental meaning to this folk. What did they plead for? Better crops? Fertility? Shorter winters? Someday, we hope to know.”

“Next frame.” The image changed again to small bundles of feces, wholly desiccated by years upon years of dry cold wind. There were scattered laughs from the audience. “This is what you think it is. Offerings of excrement from some other religious group, mixed in with fragments of cellulose, the decomposed remains of religious text, we can only assume. Did this other group worship the same deity but believe it demanded human waste instead of human sacrifice? Did this other group leave them to mock those who went up the mountain to leave their dead? Was one sect convinced this was their god and the other convinced of it instead as their devil?” The lecturer sighed. “The archeology thus far only leaves us with the smallest of tantalizing clues.”

“From what little we understand of the languages of the time, the flag recovered from one corpse says EVEREST. Was this the name of their god? Their word of plea to higher power? Perhaps a name for their sect or some legendary avatar, spiritual intercessor, they believed might speak to the mountain spirit for them?” The lecturer adjusted her glasses. “Awful as it sounds, you must understand, this had some profound meaning to them, a supernatural transcendence for them to waste their very shit and lives to speak to this god or goddess. It seems like utter folly to a more advanced civilizations like ours but it speaks volumes about these people, what was of import in their cultures. Whatever this was, this was worth killing, worth dying for, even though it’s just a particularly tall rock outcropping to us.” There were scattered laughs from the audience again.

How silly, they thought, to die for the sake of some frozen hill.

Last updated January 26, 2021