The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, her grandmother said to her at the edge of the grave. But that wasn't right, because the Lord had taken away much more than had been there to start with, and everything her child might have become was now lying there at the bottom of the pit, waiting to be covered up. Three handfuls of dirt, and the little girl running off to school with her satchel on her back now lay there in the ground, her satchel bouncing up and down as she runs ever farther; three handfuls of dirt, and the ten-year-old playing the piano with pale fingers lay there; three handfuls, and the adolescent girl men would turn to stare at as she passed because of her bright coppery hair was interred; three handfuls tossed down into the grave, and now even the grown woman who would have come to her aid when she herself had begun to move slowly, taking some task out of her hands with the words: oh, Mother — she too was slowly being suffocated by the dirt falling into her mouth. Beneath three handfuls of dirt, an old woman lay there in the grave, a woman who herself had begun to move slowly, a woman to whom another young woman, or a son, might at times have said: oh, Mother — now she too was waiting to have dirt thrown on top of her until eventually the grave would be full again, in fact even a bit fuller than full, since after all the mound of earth on a grave is always round on top because of the body underneath, even if the body lies far below the surface, where no one can see. The body of an infant that has died unexpectedly produces hardly any roundness at all. But really the mound ought to be as huge as the Alps, she thinks, even though she's never seen the Alps with her own eyes.

From The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck ©2014. Published by New Directions.