How quickly the earth and air reclaimed the dead, stripping fur from flesh and flesh from bone, leaving behind only an outline, a tailor’s pattern, pinned together with vertebrae. Fatima felt as though she was intruding on something sacred. It was as if a tailor was there in the room, unstitching the work of man, returning the house and the beasts to rubble and loam, and Fatima was not meant to see.
