Ashes

by  Andrew Pryor
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They didn’t appear in the dead of night, when no one was looking. It was the middle of June, a Friday. The beach wasn’t packed, but there were enough people to have plenty of reliable witnesses.

Depending on where you were, sitting on top of a lifeguard tower or on a towel near the tallgrass-choked fence with the sign NO TRESPASSING AFTER HOURS or stomach-down and six-years-old facing the inch-high waves head-on, they could have been taken to be any number of things. Plastic water jugs, messages-in-a-bottle, perhaps jellyfish. Some people in the shallower water picked up their feet and shrieked away from the shore before they realized what they were.

Jars, glass jars. Hundreds of them, all washed up on the beach within a matter of minutes.
It wasn’t a fear they felt, it was more of a surreal feeling, like sitting down at the dinner table to eat a music box, or trying to paint a mural with a live raccoon as your brush. Three hundred people subjected to dream logic while they were wide awake.

Everyone at the beach that day took one home, whether in that moment in the daytime, or later at night when no one else was looking. The people who took more than one gave them to loved ones, spouses, boyfriends and girlfriends, parents who collected sea glass and sand dollars and dried-up starfish.

All of them were exactly the same, wide jars made of clear glass, almost too clear, like they were missing any of the natural imperfections that a glassworker couldn’t help but make. All of them were sealed tight with a gasket and a clamp lid that no one could open. Younger kids would put them on the ground and stomp on the metal lever. Older kids would throw them at trees. Not only would they not open, they didn’t break. Not when tossed in the air or thrown in a fireplace or run over with a car. They stuck around in people’s lives the way things do when they don’t grow old or split in half or stop working.

Soon, you couldn’t go to anyone’s house without seeing one of them on a mantel, or next to jars marked “Flour” and “Sugar”, and anyone who saw one of the jars felt that they shared something with their neighbors, a shared morbidity that descended on the small seaside town.
Because the jars weren’t completely clear—they were all labeled with one word, in capital letters: ASHES.
           
It was marked on the front of every jar, scratched into the glass in such a way that brought to mind schools of fish—one thin line becoming several distinct ones, swimming against each other to form the up-and-down slant of the A, the hook of an S, the skyward curve of the H, like two arms outstretched. It made you want to feel the texture of the letters on your fingertips, in the same way a person might pinch themselves to prove a dream—but the letters were scratched on the inside.
 
 “Sometimes, as mere human beings, there are things we cannot explain.”
Pastor Doherty rested his wrists on the edge of the pulpit in the middle of his sermon and looked out at his congregation. It was summer, well after Easter had ended, and it was a week after his wife had packed all of her belongings into her suitcase. It matched the one that was still under his bed, collecting dust.

The pews were filled with empty spaces, lines of ghost parishioners separating the few regulars. Pastor Doherty spoke to both groups as he continued his sermon: “There are gaps in our line of sight as a human race, but there are also presences, weighted presences of things or people that we cannot explain even when they are right in front of us—whether they walk through our front door, or tap us on the shoulder when we’re walking from home to work, or wash up on the beach when we’re just trying to lose ourselves in the noises of the ocean.”

Several people in the congregation tittered to themselves. Doherty kept going: “But why do we, as humans, as mortals, as creatures of a just and loving God—why do we fear the unknown, the mysterious? What threatens us so much about the things that not only challenge our perceptions, but envelop them altogether?”

Doherty paused. He’d gained a somewhat notorious reputation for dragging out his sermons by pausing after rhetorical questions, as though—in the words of Deacon Matthews—he expected everyone in front of him to answer, thoughtfully and thoroughly, one at a time. Deacon Shustinger joked that when he’d married Angie, he’d paused five separate times during his wedding vows.

The pastor took a breath, then asked another question: “Well, where do we go when we die? That’s a question that countless civilizations have struggled and failed to answer, a question that so many wars have been fought over, a question that has spurred on the deaths of so many people—and it’s still a question that has no answer. It is the greatest unknown of all, and every time we’re confronted with something we can’t explain, that unexplained facet of life runs across the surface of our being, hinting at the afterlife that awaits us all, like a fissure in the layer of ice above the cold water of a lake.”

The pastor coughed. He’d lately felt like just leaving them there at the lowest point of his sermons, like the disgruntled driver of a school bus, dropping kids off on the wrong side of town and telling them to walk. But it was a pastor’s job to provide comfort above all. Comfort through faith.

 “But we are blessed, because we, as followers of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, know exactly what is waiting for us on the other side.” He coughed, cleared his throat. “We are chosen by the light of the Lord to walk in His footsteps, to follow Him in our actions and our daily life. And in that way, the greatest unknown of all is revealed to us, and in the depth of that knowledge, we can revel in all of the mysteries life flaunts before us as the workings of God himself.”

 “So my mission for you, as a follower of Christianity, is thus: go forth and illuminate your lives with the light of the Lord, not necessarily by proselytizing or grandstanding, but by being a known presence in the lives of those you love. Fill them with the warmth and light of your kindness and compassion, and together, you can stand without fear of that which you cannot explain or place within your lives.” The pastor bowed his head. “Let us pray. Dear God, thank you for…”
 
Doherty didn’t arrive home from church until later that evening, when the sun hung low and small and red against the sky, like a coin from a forge. A few of the churchgoers had asked him how he was doing—he said he was doing fine—and if he needed any help—he said no, because those two answers were the correct ones, even if they weren’t the right ones.

He didn’t feel particularly hungry, just tired, so he bypassed the kitchen and went straight to the bedroom, taking care to remove his Sunday shoes and socks and place them against the wall near the door. He sat on the bed in his undershirt and boxers and looked at the windowsill, where Angie’s jar sat. His was in the kitchen, sitting on top of the microwave.

The jar was the only thing Angie had left behind, and other than the suitcase under the bed, it was the only thing they had in common anymore.

He remembered that day at the beach. He had gone, and Angie had stayed home to read a book. He told her before he left that she might like reading on the beach, and she’d refused, saying that even with sunglasses, the sunlight made it impossible to trap the words on the page.

He’d picked up two of the jars as they’d washed up on the beach, laughing softly as people watched, joking that he’d found early His and Hers anniversary presents for him and Angie. Angie’d said nothing about them when he brought them home, then one morning a couple days after, he’d found hers on the cement walkway outside the window, unbroken next to the drainpipe. He’d asked her about it then, and she’d answered his question with another question: “Why did you bring them home in the first place?”
“I don’t know,” he’d said. “I thought it’d be funny.”
“You have the Cryptkeeper’s definition of funny,” she said.
“What, you can’t picture us growing old together?” Doherty said.
“That’s not growing old, that’s growing grass,” she said. “I don’t want to roll over and see that in the morning anymore.”

He didn’t know why he’d put it back the next day. Maybe he just wanted her to finally crack a smile, or get even angrier, something that would loosen the clot between their two hearts. Maybe he just wanted to win the argument. She didn’t mention it at all when he put it back on the windowsill. He didn’t even know for sure if it was the reason she’d left. A sudden absence wasn’t the kind of answer he could explain, it was just another unknown that he preferred to keep in the background of his mind.

As he flicked the light switch, there was a soft hissing noise, then a pop. Doherty sat in the darkness for a split-second, then flicked the light switch on and off a few times. It worked perfectly. He turned away from the switch in bewilderment and glanced to his right. His eyes caught the windowsill, then stayed there, fixed.

The jar was open. The metal lever had been raised, and the lid rested loose and askew on the top of the jar. He stood up and walked over to the jar, inspected it. Lifted the lid and looked inside. It was empty. He brought his nose to the lip of the jar and inhaled. Nothing.

As he stood there, the phone beside his bed rang, once, twice, three times. Doherty heard the noise in the back of his mind, and then it rushed to the front, barreled its way through any other thought he could have had and stood at the front edge of his psyche, blaring itself over and over again, a ringing phone on a stage hung with a backdrop of the scrawled word ASHES, twenty-feet tall, scratched frantically like a man trying to write his Last Will and Testament with his fingernails on the inside of a well.

The phone rang three more times, then stopped. Doherty stood, his hands folded over the jar, gripping it, the blood rushing out of the tips of his fingers. He thought of Angie, only Angie, of the last time he saw her, laying upon her side of the bed, asleep in the morning light as he got ready for work, undisturbed, how that all she needed was some rest, some sleep to unmoor her mind and give everything a new perspective, and how when he came home he would be a new man, and she a new woman, and they would both start over again, their arms around each other, their hearts facing each other.
The phone rang again.

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