Instructions for Burying a Mountain
When a living mountain dies, the villages on its slopes hire an undertaker to bury it.
ImagineYourBook writes a fresh draft from this idea.
How it begins
The coffin measurements arrived by cart.
Marta watched two men unroll the paper across her workshop, through the doorway and halfway down the street.
"That's the height," one said.
She set down her tea.
"And the width?"
"The other cart."
For thirty-one years she had buried the people of the valley. She knew how to measure a body without making the family watch, how to repair a cracked handle and when silence was more useful than a price.
This appeared to require a different set of skills.
"Who has died?"
The younger man pointed through the window.
Beyond the roofs, Mount Halden stood beneath its usual shawl of cloud.
Marta waited.
He kept pointing.
"No," she said.
The older man removed his hat.
"It stopped breathing at dawn."
Now that he mentioned it, the morning felt wrong. The familiar slow movement of the mountain's eastern ridge had ceased. No warm mist rose from its caves. The village bells sounded unusually small.
A third visitor entered without knocking. Mud covered his boots to the knees.
"Eben Rill. River surveyor."
"Please tell me you've brought a sensible explanation."
He placed a sealed jar on her table.
Inside, river water shone a dull copper.
"Three springs changed color this morning. The lower villages have stopped drinking from them."
Marta looked again at the mountain. Five villages climbed its slopes. Orchards, chapels, schools. Her sister's house stood just below the shoulder.
"You can't move that."
"No."
"You can't leave it."
Eben said nothing.
The men in the doorway looked at her with an expectation she recognized from every grieving family who had ever entered her shop.
Tell us what happens next.
She opened the measurements.
At the bottom, beneath the surveyor's careful figures, someone had copied a sentence from the mountain's final rumble.
I WOULD LIKE TO LIE DOWN.
Marta read it twice.
Then she asked for a larger table.
Your idea. Your book.
Keep the spark. Change anything.
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Outline and characters
- Marta receives a commission to bury a mountain.
- Eben shows her the first poisoned spring.
- Villagers argue over whether moving or preserving the body is worse.
- Marta maps how the mountain supported different communities.
- They discover that its final wish was to become a valley.
- A merchant proposes a profitable excavation that would displace everyone.
- Marta admits there is no funeral without some irreversible loss.
- The villages plan a gradual retreat and shared rebuilding.
- They open old water channels to transform the mountain safely over years.
- The first memorial is held beside a clean river where a new settlement begins.
Characters
- Marta Dune, 57. An undertaker whose largest previous client was a horse
- Eben Rill, 43. A river surveyor born on the dying mountain
Series possibilities
- A coastal town asks Marta to arrange a memorial for a disappearing island.
