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When I was young, I must have checked "A Medicine for Melancholy" out of the school library a dozen times. Ray Bradbury's stories were strange and solemn, sometimes surreal, sometimes chilling, sometimes about something as small and tangible as the sensation of wearing a brand new pair of sneakers. He knew just what it was like wearing those new sneakers: You could be a horse galloping, muscles bunching and stretching as you flew over asphalt that was soft and springy as a marshmallow.

The title story of "Medicine for Melancholy" was about a sad young woman. Her family was desperately searching for a cure for her, which involved taking her bed outside at night. The story was more strange than comforting, but I liked reading it and Bradbury's many others.

I'll read anything but have a particular love for science fiction. Bradbury might be considered a fantasy writer by a strict definition, as his stories usually were pretty light on the "science" side, but his they include SF themes such as space travel, aliens, robots and simulacra.

I was in the Newman Library recently, looking for a Bradbury story. On the shelf near the book I sought, the sight of another Bradbury book sent me back in time. This book is a tall black hardback, only about 100 pages long. It is titled "The Mummies of Guanajuato." I had checked this book out on one of my first visits to this library, when I was about 13. It is a reprinting of a Bradbury story that was first published in 1947, called "The Next in Line." It also contains dozens of full-page black-and-white pictures by Archie Lieberman, copyrighted in 1978.

I hadn't put it together when I was actually there, but I certainly realize now that the story and the mummies were in Guanajuato, Mexico.

When I visited the "Museo De Las Momias" (The Museum of the Mummies) back in May, I remembered the mummies in "The Next in Line." I didn't know for sure that they were the same ones. The museum seems quite different from Bradbury's 1947 description, in which the main characters go down in catacombs under a graveyard. The current museum is a free-standing building where the mummies are carefully tended and displayed behind glass.

I didn't read Spanish well enough to grasp the accounts of the mummies posted by the cases. From what Bradbury explained, and I corroborated in other accounts of the mummies, the custom was the same as some cemeteries in Europe. When people died, their families could pay a large fee to have them permanently entombed. If they didn't have that much money, they could pay a recurring small fee. If the small fee was left unpaid, the body would be disinterred and cremated.

Apparently the climate and geography of Guanajuato leads to some bodies mummifying. The mummies were such curiosities that they were not cremated, but were instead put on display as a tourist attraction, working to make money to support the city. The mummy display started around the 1870s, and they are still there today.

The Bradbury story had levels that didn't appeal to me when I was young. "The Last in Line" is about a couple on vacation traveling in Mexico. They visit Guanajuato a few days after the Day of the Dead celebrations, so it must have been in early November. The husband, Joseph, is excited about the mummies, while his wife, Marie, is not. She is lonely, she and her husband don't talk and he doesn't notice how disturbed she is by the cultural relationship with death.

They go to see the mummies; he takes pictures of them and crassly tries to buy one. Marie is frightened and Joseph buys and eats a sugar skull with her name on it. When their car breaks down and they can't get out of the city, she becomes irrational, sure that she is going to die there and Joseph is going to take her to the catacombs. Sure enough, at the end of the story, he drives away from the city alone. I didn't understand the adult ideas of the story, the fear of death, the possibility of madness and the horrors that adults in relationships can inflict on one another. The idea of catacombs with mummies in them seemed very abstract. I certainly didn't expect to meet them myself as an adult.

I re-read the story and looked at the pictures of the mummies. The photographer explained in the foreword that he was doing what Joseph had said in the story: "I'd like a color shot of each ... it would be an amazing, an ironical book to publish." As when I visited the mummies, they didn't scare me. They were sad and solemn more than creepy or exploitative. I don't aspire to mummy-hood, but there are worse fates than touching someone after death.

Pris Sears grew up in Florida, lives in Blacksburg and works among Virginia Tech's computers.