SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: December 23, 2021] “The Fire Balloons”
This year, S. ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my seventh time reading the Calendar. The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individually bound short stories.
As always, each story is a surprise, so you won’t know what you’re getting until you crack the seal every morning starting December 1. Once you’ve read that day’s story, check this link where editor Alberto Manguel is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.
This is the kind of story that unfolds itself, proving to be too big for itself.
It is about a king who feared death. So he ordered a cemetery to be built in the center of the kingdom with very high walls. Everyone currently buried would be dg up and moved to the new cemetery.
This takes extensive time and involves many years of building a digging (often with one piece sufficing as an entire body).
There was supposed to be nothing around the cemetery but because of all the work it entailed, small communes built up around the entrances. Then businesses followed. Then proper housing.
And soon enough people started burying their dead outside of the cemetery.
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