cremation

I know what cremation means. I didn't before - but daddy told me that mama was cremated and that's why she fit inside that box. But still I cannot really believe it. My beautiful mama, sick, then dead, and now all burned up into nothing. She is nothing more than the stuff in the bottom of the fireplace, and sometimes I sit on the bricks and hold fireplace ashes in my hand until grandma tells me to stop.

My friend Missy is the pastor's kid. She is 7, and acts like she knows everything. At Sunday school the next week, she asks me why I wasn't at the burial.

"What?" I say."I was there."
"No," she says, "You were at the funeral. I mean the burial - you know when they bury her in the ground. I was there - but you weren't."
I am sitting at the table, shaving curlicues from a purple crayon with my thumbnail. My brain is racing around in a circle. I was there - I was with her. I saw the box, I held the box, I left the box . . . and then I suck in my breath, because I know Missy is right. We stayed with Aunt Annie after the funeral - and everybody else came home later.

And now there is one more reason for me to be angry. Daddy just stole my last minutes with her. He didn't even ask - he just didn't include me. Just like she didn't want me to see her sick. She probably didn't want me to see the hole - and the dirt and leaving her.

I look at Missy, she has a know-it-all look on her face and I want to slap it off. But I can't because she has something I need - she knows what happened and nobody else will tell. I don't look up from my crayon - because if Missy guesses how much I want to know, she will not tell me.

So I just stare at the table and say in my most regular voice, "Did you go to the cremation too?" I know she will say no. Daddy told me that nobody can go - but maybe that was a lie too. There are so many.

"Yes," she says, "I was at that too." My crayon drops and rolls under the table. I bend down to get it so I can wipe my eyes.

"What did you do there?" I say.

Missy sits on the floor and works the buckle on her shoe. She talks like she is telling me what she had for lunch. Like she goes to cremations all of the time. "Well," she says, "There was this window so everybody could watch and they put her on the table and started her on fire and then she turned black and crumpled into ashes and then they shoveled her into a box."

My eyes are big and I cannot breathe - not at all. I run out of the room - out of the building, and when the breathing starts again, there is throw-up behind it. I squish my eyes shut tight and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. I lean up against the cool bricks -my mouth sour - my eyes shut. All I can see is my beautiful mama in her blue robe, on fire, crying tears. Then she is black like a fireplace log - her face turned toward me. But I am not scared - I am furious.

When they burned my mama - when they made sure that she was nothing - just dirt - I was not there.