I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it. But I’ve had a long time to sit with death, now. The hero doesn’t die, can’t die, because then the story ends. We shouldn’t spend it feeding somebody else’s cause.” That is the good death, the best death, and that is the death I wish not only for myself, but for you, too. I could give back something to this world instead of taking, taking, taking.

I want my bleached bones scatted across my own land, broken and sucked clean of marrow, half buried in snow and finally, finally, covered over in loam and ground to dust by the passage of time, until I am broken into fragments, the pieces of my body returned to where they came. I want a death rattle, a final breath, a body intact that can then be torn apart by scavengers, riddled with worms, my limbs dragged off to feed some family of little foxes, my guts teeming with maggots, until I am nothing but a gooey collection of juices that feeds the fungi and the oak seedlings and the wild grasses.

I want to find a cool place in the woods under some old oak tree and settle down there and die as the sun comes up. “When I’m old and dying, wheezing my guts out, my organs failing, I want to walk out the front door of some old farmhouse on my own land, maybe forty, fifty hectares of it.

The light brigade by kameron hurley