spaces

Inside the cardboard box, Richard was dressed in a pair of grey slacks, frayed and discolored at the hems. The pocket of his striped shortsleeve shirt sagged – stretched by the multiple notebooks he always carried for vacuum orders and payment notations. Into that empty space, we had slipped photos of his daughters and granddaughter, and a wild card from his favorite card game.

We stared through a viewing window into the sparsely outfitted incineration room. A single desk in the corner. Looks easy to clean, Chris said. Behind a blue curtain, hair follicles were plucked, a finger printed, a photo taken, a once-over for foul play. Then the medical examiner was gone, not looking our way. We went in.

The cardboard box could have held a bench or ironing board. I imagined Richard packed in foam peanuts. Chris ran her hand over the tan container, fastened with a black strap and tied in a bow. A few moments later, the crematory operator slid the box into the dusky mouth of the retort oven, propane fires roaring like engines but kept out of sight for now. The door came down. A button was pushed and the tiny round window filled with a bright orange glow.

Richard would take three-and-a-half hours to burn, at 1,400 degrees. Probably higher since fat and oils burn hotter and Richard loved doughnuts. At his prime he might have been a 2,200-degree man, but he’d lost weight since moving to the nursing home four years ago. In the morning, a magnet will be passed over the ashes to extract any metals. His 210-pound body will then fill an urn the size of a milk jug. For now, there was nothing more to see.

In the car outside, we turned back in our seats toward the small, non-descript building with the short smokestack on top – no smoke yet only a shimmer of heat burrowing into the grey sky. Chris rolled down the window, to breathe in her father one last time, opening up the deepest parts of her lungs. In the distance, a cloud had slit itself open and bled out the afternoon’s last light.