Ain't That Somethin'?

Furious Fiction: July 2026 Story Showcase. Photo credit: Australian Writers’ Centre.

*NOTE: I’m resharing this story—originally titled “Mummy of Marirtyef”—because Australian Writers’ Centre just announced today that it was selected as one of the top stories for the Furious Fiction: July 2026 Story Showcase!

Everyone is here to see the Mummy of Marirtyef.

The placard tells me she’s a woman. 50s. Intermediate period, 2100-2040 BC. Excavated in 1912 by Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition.

‘The same year the Titanic sank,’ I think. Because Hollywood did that one. Because Leonardo DiCaprio stole my nine-year-old heart and Rose DeWitt Bukater inspired my prom hairstyle.

A little boy grips his father’s hand and demands he look at her blue faience beads.

“Ain’t that somethin’?” the dad says, with tentative disinterest. Unsure of how much weight he wants to channel into her existence in the 20 seconds or so that he examines the silhouette of her body, plastered in linen and four-thousand-year-old grime.

They move along with the flow of the crowd. One person, then the next, as I remain planted in front of the glass casing.

It must be odd to be made a spectacle of by strangers. To be stared at by little boys and parents with things like 401ks because what’s that to a mummy anyway? Wouldn’t she want them to know how she lived her life?

Do they know anything of her beyond this placard? Whether she bathed her children in the Nile, or believed dreams were portals to the supernatural, or felt most herself spinning flax into thread before weaving it into linen for her family’s clothing?

And did they know you listened to “Hips Don’t Lie” on repeat after dad left us for another woman, your best Shakira voice seeping through the creases in my door on a Sunday morning? Your voice and sunshine: two mortal enemies to my teenage sleep schedule.

Did they see it when you’d pull my whole body into your lap and coo there, there, patting my back with your open palm? Raking your unpolished fingernails against my scalp until I fell asleep and all was well. Three or twenty-three—my age didn’t matter.

And when they shook my hand and said, “I’m sorry for your loss,” did they understand the weight of it? That I was forever changed and my walking encyclopedia, my temple of knowledge, was swallowed by the thickness of time.

A college student bumps into me, spilling cold coffee down my brand-new white blouse. It slicks my mother’s blue beads, the ones she chose not to take with her.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, not sure what to do with her hands. Wanting to fix it, but too modest to touch my breasts.

I point to the sign above the entryway: NO FOOD OR BEVERAGE.

She looks at it, then at me, her mouth opening and closing around another apology.

Then she is gone too, absorbed into the soft, shuffling procession of the living.