The Dead Beneath Your Feet

You are standing on the floor of your home, and your grandmother is directly beneath you. Not buried outside, not carried to a hillside — beneath you, under the plaster you smoothed with your own hands, in the exact spot where you sleep. This is not a grave. This is a house. The same house where you eat, where you nurse your children, where you grind the grain. She has been here since before you were born, and her mother is beneath her, and her mother's mother beneath that. Layer upon layer, going down like pages in a book no one reads aloud. The archaeologists who opened Çatalhöyük found them in the hundreds — bodies folded tight, knees to chest, tucked beneath sleeping platforms as if simply resting. Skulls, sometimes, had been removed after burial and replastered, given new painted faces, and kept. Not as trophies. As something closer to presence. The dead at Çatalhöyük did not leave. They stayed in the walls, in the floor, in the foundations, generation after generation, the house itself growing slowly into a kind of body — stone and plaster and bone, all one thing. No word we have quite fits what that made the living.