The flesh had been the first to melt away. The fire licked up the hair, eyes, skin, fat, stomach, heart, lungs and so on, until only the hard bits of my body remained. My skull rested on one end of the tray. The rest of the bones had been gathered into a desiccated bouquet of ribs and shards. A couple of knobby vertebrates peeked out from the bed of gray ash.
My family leaned over the tray, heads bent in watch. But I hung back, adrift but cinched by a sudden urge to reach into the remains and grab what appeared to be the clavicle. It was a sturdy rod, long as a palm is wide, wide enough to hang a skeleton on. I had felt it traverse my body once, where unlike the other bones buried in layers of fat and muscle, the clavicle protrudes gently out of skin. I remember what it was like to run my fingers along the deep crevice that a pair of them would form under a fluttering, silk shirt.
***
Before my body burned, it lay in a dark, plush casket in the sandalwood-soaked air of the temple courtyard. I sensed moving bodies through my closed eyelids. The murmuring voices called my name, bearing joss sticks. Above the altar hung my portrait, flanked by sumptuous flower wreaths. In the photo, large pearls were clinging to long, wrinkled earlobes that looked like dried mushrooms. The left corner of my lips was drooping, like a dog’s limp tail. I was wearing an inscrutable expression, a crooked grimace, a coda, my body cut off right at the collarbone by the frame’s edge.
Rites done right became ordinary. Old friends, neighbors, former colleagues, children of those who were too sick themselves to come, distant relatives, not many left in my generation still living, then, two sons, three daughters, four grandchildren, husband, their names dissolving fast like broth pouring through a sieve. Where does it all go? Them, me, this place? As I chewed a slice of guava upon the altar, fragrant smoke curled around me, and I pondered this.
***
The reading of the bones began. In the windowless room at the funeral hall, the suited attendant talked like a game show host, sculpting the stale air with his hands as he spoke. An intact skull, he announced to my family, indicates good karma.
Now, look here, he said, pointing to the tawny edge of a knuckle bone. Streaks of yellow mean heavy medications towards the end of her life. Healthy bones would be white.
I was glad to see the clavicle was a pleasing hue of ivory. I wondered in earnest if it was still hot. It looked fairly solid, but a few hours of incineration could have melted the marrow so all that remained was a thin shell. The urge to grab it was growing. Right as I reached in, there was a flicker in the corner of the room. Then a quiet bark.
A little white dog had appeared out of nowhere; it looked exactly like the one that used to live with us back on HPL Road, before he disappeared one night. Even his whiskers crusted familiarly around his snout.
I drifted low to scratch its ears. The dog said, you don’t have to look.
Look at what? I asked.
They’re going to bang the bones to dust and stuff it in an urn.
I sighed.
It’s the clavicle that ties me here, I told the little dog. I just want touch it one last time to see if it will crumble away in my hand.
I understand, said the dog. I love bones too.
***
So the dog and I decided to go outside and catch a breath. Next to the funeral parlor was a grove. The ground was covered in twigs and acorns. I dug up a stick to toss for the dog who ran back and forth a few times before tiring out at my side.
We came to an ancient tree lying on its side. Gnarled roots twisted out of the earth. From afar, the wood had looked firm and sound, but up close, I saw that the trunk had hollowed out. Its emptied core was bursting with ears of fungus and insect nests. The bark had started to peel, and a soft pelt of lichen crept over the side of its wooden body. The little dog sniffed at the mulch.
In the distance, I heard a cracking noise like a big dead tree coming down, another felled giant meeting the forest floor. I hoped no one and no house was in its path.
But then I realized it was the sound of my oldest daughter’s voice. In her booming way, she was talking directly to the bones in the tray, saying, there’s nothing to be afraid of, it’s okay to go.
***
My family took the ancestral urn aboard the bus. The dog and I sat in the back. We left the skyscrapers and boulevards of the city, passing stalls with steaming vats of buns, rain-washed buildings, the bus depot on the outskirts of town. When we reached the mountaintop, my family buried my body bits in a shaded plot where over several years the ashes would seep into the soil and one day grow into flowers.
A gray mist was brewing in the atmosphere, and it clung to the branches and buds of the pink trees like silk cloth. The bus drove away. I realized I had been here before, at the bottom of a breath, in the invisible world stirring to form. By then, I was fast dissolving into the ground, air, sky. There were no names nor shapes anymore, only a last whispered sound of an urge breaking apart.
Take care of the clavicle, I said to the little white dog sitting by the plot, its tail wagging and tongue hanging out. Then, even that final urge loosened, and the little that remained of me, let go.
Yasmine Yu is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has been previously published in The Cincinnati Review miCRo.
Lost Balloon 