THE BOX
Word Count: 429
The box is so small, covered in red satin and sealed though the man told me how to break the seal to spread the ashes. He gave me a pamphlet that held the more delicate details regarding choices and wind.
Joseph was a large man, six-two. When I got home I placed it on top of his dresser. It was hard enough to comprehend his being gone. It is harder to think that all that is left of him is contained in this red satin box.
I turned back and carried it out with me to the living room and placed it on the coffee table in front of the couch. I picked it back up and wondered at how little it weighed, how much it weighed for so little. I held it there in my lap, leaned back and closed my eyes, tried to imagine him inside but shot upright when all I could see was his face licked by flames.
That’s what’s been happening, the images that come when I think of him and he comes in his last moments, and he comes in a face other-worldly. When I open my eyes, wake up, turn off the film, I’m left with that last image and try to blink it away.
It sometimes reminds me of his face when he climaxed inside and above me. Except then there wasn’t that fear. It’s the fear and the fire that I’m left with. The fear and the fire and this box.
I took it with me into the kitchen, set it on the table as I made something to eat. A can of soup was the most I could manage. I wondered if this was the right thing to do. If I thought of God, a God, a life after death, the small box I decided means nothing. Joseph’s spirit was what I am missing, Joseph’s mind, his love.
Then when I believed in nothing at all but this life, this as the end of all things, then it hit me that the ashes are all I have left. They became suddenly precious and horrible both.
I’ve decided, many months as a widow now, that I will not trust Joseph to the wind. I’ve set him on the table on his side of the bed where at night, in the dark, he is sleeping, not gone. Where I can whisper into the blackness and not know if he’s there or he’s not. Where sometimes, if I hold my own breath and listen, I can still hear him breath.
this is a lovely & terribly sad sequence addressing loss and grief, susan. they feel very close to the world but somehow float apart from it enough to let someone else into this particular emotional and ritual place. it’s hard to do i think because it’s at once almost universal (sooner or later) and entirely specific, in the way any pain is. so writing about it can become very abstract for another—it’s almost like the closer the writing stays to the world, to the reality of this, the more abstract it becomes. but these stories (i read two or three before i decided to write this) seem to me to find the necessary balance to allow what you’re breathing get assimilated into that of another. tough to do if you leave yourself as open in the writing as you may be in the world. and this feels like you do. maybe that’s the art of these.
Well, the questions we all have about death but are afraid to talk about have been hitting me in the face lately. I take what’s happened, what I’m feeling, what others are feeling, what I see and take it all further. What you say is interesting. Scott McCloud’s book about writing comics touches on the drawing of faces for example, and giving less detail so that it is more easily related to by the reader. I haven’t consciously been plotting out anything but this series that I’m just starting to break away from a bit seems to come in waves of characters and reactions. It’s been helpful to me to write and understand it all a bit better.