The Urn That Took on Dust

Quick note: This is a horror short

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At rest upon the mantel piece.
A forgotten shelf that lays cracked with coiling sheafs of degraded whitewash. Patches of paint that had long ago become lifted in wilting absentia and now exposed the wooden frame underneath leaving it bare to the day’s setting sun. We painted this mantle together, its dusty surface different back then, it was bright, coated with the freshness of new love.
White, we chose: a simple colour, something we couldn’t argue over.

We argued.
We lived, slept, we existed beside one another, but there was no love there, no real reason dictating as to why we should spend each night avoiding one another’s eyes, no sense that we go on with the hope that not even memory may live on as in dust or under a candle’s dying wick. 

I could have helped; many would have helped.
I could have called for a doctor that morning. But as I left for work, recognition glanced upon you with dead eyes. I saw you, wracked with fever and stirring in fretted dream; I saw your once deep hazel eyes now faded into grey, I knew, I left.
On my return I sat for countless hours in silence before I could call for help.

It was not with relief or any grand sense of freedom that accompanied the pyre’s glow on that night: its flicker boldly outlined against that winter’s darkness, it was a feeling of nothingness, a cold absence deprived of emotion that elicited, once again, the hollow din of nothingness in totality. I walked home not laden with the guilty mind of the condemned but with a distant pang of otherness, something that even now I struggle to annotate. 

Was it an afterthought that drew me to place your urn upon the mantle? Some melancholic reminder of you to notice with fleeting glances each day? Something serving as a final punishment of memory long after the fire had turned unto ash and its last ember then dwindled into smoke?
No, I imagine I placed you there as a cruelty, a small act of vindictiveness towards myself, forcing you to remain within a room of water-coloured reflection, a room we painted, we built, together.   

I did not cry, even now I seem incapable of descending into the lashings of guilt that I should be so wracked with. I attempted to feel sadness, joy, anything emotion that would grant me an ending, but I could only find normalcy: a nothingness that picked and scratched at the fraying coils of my nerve like some distant clock that hammers each second into the echo of another sleepless night.
I became distracted within these moments, lost within an ash-coloured sea as shore light became absent, lost within my own home. I became unable to perform the routines of life I had once enjoyed and would find myself pacing, just pacing around this room until I was tired enough to sleep.

The urn took on dust.
As I cleaned that small brown porcelain urn – your urn – a coating dust clung to its surface, a coating of flecked grey that only centuries could bring. 
A glaze, some foreign imperfection in its manufacture, I thought. Surely fitting that even in reliquary your existence must be so confounding to me.

But no, it was clearly dust, a small circle of white stood on the mantle beneath the kiss of where you lay moments before; running my fingers across the cracked paint the time worn surface became scared by my tracing movement, a disturbance left streaked across the wood.
Had it been so long?
Maybe only fallen ash, the bushfires of the lower hills wafted upward and alighted through the box-window of this room, ashes to ashes: a spectre of silent reproach.
But the window was closed, it had always been closed.

Dust, as fine as sand, began to cascade from my cupped palm. I thought your urn to have fractured upon my intrusion but as I placed you back upon the mantle, panic quickening my trembling hand, the mystery remained, a small clasp of ashen dust still emptying itself from my palm.
The day, that horribly grey day, became enclosed within the sound distant rain, a burgeoning storm that stirred from some distance to the north. It sought to swallow the day, sought to enclose the world below as it raged upon the heaven’s skyline.
The rumbles of thunder that may shatter stone followed in lockstep, guttural howls of ancient titans once lost of this earth, now drawn back into life. Revived by this thunder and rekindling within it their anger, their hate…the rumble of their distant hatred.
And still your urn remained, collecting dust.

What haunting cruelty have you wrecked upon me? Why must the flowing trickle of dust overtake this room as if it were only sand through an hourglass? Cascades of ash that ladens my action and drives the air to become heavy. You! You who linger inside this room, how could you haunt me so, even in your absence? I cry to thee, I pray to thee, leave me and away yourself from this room. Hang not heavy within this place where we once knew love! Let memory rest as you do now, quietly upon the mantle.

Or I…Or I too shall become dust,

Nothing but dust…

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J.McCray
2020