Rag and Bone
by Sunshine Barbito
My knees sink into the mud and grass while I try and think of a prayer. It was just lying there in forever-sleep. Eyes open but not awake, it stopped me in my tracks. I clenched the neck of a bulging trash bag. The bag, full of food scraps and junk mail, stuffed animals and dream journals, started to rip where my old Barbie’s feet push through the plastic.
The rat’s stomach looked still soft.
Its coat, all grey with little white hairs hiding in it, could’ve been made of eyelashes if it wasn’t a rodent. After I got the bag into the trash and shut the lid, I bent over and stared at the rat. Its eyes reflected sparkles of the almost morning light. And I wondered if anyone was coming for it, to bury it.
In the house I grabbed the shovel from the fireplace.
Its little stomach jiggled at the scoop. It slid off the end of the shovel into an old takeout bag from my kitchen. I took the rat and the makeshift burial tool to the backyard. The chopsticks from last week’s Chinese stuck out of my pocket.
With my knees going numb against the grass, I turned dirt over, dug into the grass with the shovel; drew the rat a grave. The bag crinkled and sounded like rain on a rooftop as I lowered the rat into the ground and shoveled dirt and mud on top of it. With an old Barbie bow, I tied the chopsticks together in a cross, to mark the resting place.
Now, my breath blows warm through prayer hands. And still, no final words come to mind.
No blessings or goodbyes for the dead-pest-thing.
It’s Tuesday morning. The trashcans stand on the side of the road waiting to be swept off their feet. It’s been raining this week so it all kind of smells like water.
I might’ve missed the rat this morning if I hadn’t been kept awake all night, by the boxes in my basement. Boxes of once-special things. Since he died, my old toys and stuffed animals, my baby blankets and stuffed animals, they won’t stop yelling my name, scratching at my skin.
In my basement where all that happens is laundry and storage, I sifted through my childhood. I found Doggy at the bottom of a damp box, labeled, Memories. Tattered and torn, made of red and white silk. Doggy was just lying there, all wide-eyed and forgotten.
My blankets didn’t smell the way they used to. They used to smell like Mom’s skin; smoke and perfume. Like my dad’s breath, when he was alive, and he spoke too close to your face. With his hands on your legs and his eyes flapping to stay open. In the memory box, plastic humans were stacked on top of each other, half clothed. Barbies.
Kid things that you keep, and after a while, you’re not really sure why.
Over the phone, the funeral director tells me that my dad’s ashes are ready. He tells me what I should know about the pickup. I step into pants and arm into a shirt and brush hair out of my face, then pause for a moment in front of the mirror.
The director greets me at the door of the funeral home. His black suit fits tight around his professional-man-body, pens in his jacket pocket. He looks like a priest and it’d be nice if he’d offer to pray for me, maybe he could give me some ideas for my own goodbyes, but I don’t ask. The fluorescent light reflects off his hair. He asks me if I’m here about my dad as if he doesn’t already know. He calls me, young woman, and says that he wishes he was meeting me under different circumstances. He tells me to wait a moment.
His footsteps become quiet as he descends the stairs into the room where he unbodies bodies. My fingers get stuck in my hair as I try and untangle it, shaking. My tongue goes paper dry. I can feel each one of my taste buds scraping against the roof of my mouth and count them, get to my age. The funeral director climbs back up the stairs.
He holds it out in front of him, grey and bulging with what looks like little rocks. When we’re close enough to speak, he bends his elbows. The plastic bag rests at the end of his tie. I open my mouth and look at him, but nothing comes to mind.
“We never received instructions,” he clears his throat, “regarding the preferred receptacle,” he says, and tilts his head sympathetically; priest-sympathy.
He brings the bag of ashes up to his chest. I pull the plastic-bag-dead-dad-thing away from him and almost drop it. The cold of it shocks me. Ashes should be hot or warm at least, something close to alive. But they’re cold. The plastic and the grey and the little rocks all feel like him. The man who unbodied my father touches my arm and asks if I got it.
“He’s fine,” blurts out of me.
My palms sweat against the bag.
In the parking lot, the wind cuts across my face. I stand at my car and stare at the bag of my dad. The reflection of me in the car window, a curly, tangly mess. Still a daughter, while Mom’s alive. He spent his whole life unfathering me. And this was his final effort. Found lying on his couch, thrown up and not breathing, in his empty house.
Finally, not going to wake up at any moment and tell me to come here.
Finally, unsalvageable.
I hold the plastic bag of him against my stomach. The weight feels familiar.
For a second, I miss this.
The hairs on my arms stand up. The bag rests on my lap while I drive to Mom’s.
She opens the door before I can turn and use my elbow to knock. Mom leans out of the doorway, her feet safely behind the doorframe. Her hair swings around my body and hugs my lower back as she wraps her arms around me. She puts her hand on the back of my head and starts stroking my hair, her ring-beaded fingers getting stuck in my knots. Some of my hair comes out on the sharp edge of a gemstone. Mom looks at her ring and giggles, pulling strands of hair out of it. And there’s the smell of newspapers and always inhabited home.
A sound comes from her throat like she’s about to speak, but she doesn’t. She jerks away from me and slaps the back of her ring-beaded hand against the bag of Dad’s ashes.
“Oh,” she grabs her chest in relief, “I thought there was something you weren’t telling me,” she says. My mom squints and smiles.
“I was just talking to Peter about you today, you know he still asks about you,” she says as she pulls me in by my shirtsleeve. “You’re letting the heat out,” she says. “Peter really is a good one,” Mom walks off down the hallway. I lean into the door and close it with my back.
“The mailman?” I say. My hands sweat against Dad’s new body.
In the small hallway to what was once a kitchen, she shuffles through stacks of once relevant newspapers and binders labeled scrapbook, with nothing inside them. I count them and get to the number of drinks my dad said he could stomach. He’d lectured me on blood alcohol content and body weight.
He’s use big, slurred words to prove to Mom and I that he couldn’t possibly be drunk.
“Look at me, look at my body,” Dad would say, slapping the fat of his arms, “A couple of these couldn’t get me drunk.” He’d drink another glass of that brown drink that burned him, but in a good way. That made his spit so thick. He’d wipe his slobbery mouth with the back of his father-hand. He’d tell me to come here.
My hip scrapes along the back of the couch as I wade through clothes and shoes and cans that were meant to be recycled.
“Oh,” Mom says, “And I think I’ve finally realized why your aunt and I don’t speak anymore.” She pushes plates and bags of groceries, never opened around the counter. “She thinks she’s better than me,” she says, “plain and simple.”
I stop in the doorway and watch her.
“She thinks because she went off and got a degree and a job,” Mom says, “she thinks that makes her special.” She finds a glass and turns it over, lets some liquid out on the floor, before she fills, tucks it under the faucet in a space free of dishes. “I created a family, right here, out of my own body,” she taps her chest with her free hand.
My mom purses her lips at me and says, “And so will you, one day.”
She holds out the glass of water to me, murky and lavender with what it carried before.
Mom squints her eyes and points at the bag of dad and asks, “They didn’t charge for any of that, did they?” I look at the glass, sigh, then back at her. She puts the glass in the sink and starts sifting unopened mail, making a pile of information. “I told them, I said, ‘Look, my daughter’s coming to get him, but I’m paying for it.’ It’s outrageous, that stuff,” she says.
“When did he ask you?” I say, “I didn’t even know you guys were talking.”
Mom reaches out for my arm. I pull away, hold the bag between us and say, “What do I do with it?” My voice cracks.
Rolls of plastic and grey squeeze through my fingers. And she just turns back to her pile of mail. “Anyway, Peter’s single,” she says, puts her head down and goes back to burrowing. She goes, “And before you say anything, just listen,” and puts her hand up to me.
I stare down at her floor while she talks. What you can see of her carpet is scattered with rat traps and chopsticks from the food she has delivered because she hasn’t left the house since I had a high-school body. Since people started to notice the markings on my body. And how that plus no boyfriend, plus the old clothes and the state of our house, how it all started to add up.
“He’s a little older,” Mom whispers to me, like letting me in on a secret, “which usually a mother would worry about. But I see him every day and I approve,” she giggles to herself.
“Mom,” I say, and she shakes her head.
She touches my arm and goes, “He’s good people, sweetie.”
I stare at her, jaw clenched; wince at her touch.
My mom huffs, “Honey,” she crosses her arms and says, “What do you want me to do, huh?” I pull away from her before she can finish. My throat feels dry and my cheeks flush red.
Before she can tell me that she knows our family wasn’t perfect, but things have changed. Before she can tell me how hard it was for her to leave my dad because of his drinking. Like his drinking was the worst of him.
“Mom,” I yell.
“Well fine then, what is it?” she asks, and she laughs.
My hands start to shake. “Five hundred,” I say. “That’s how much they charged me for Dad. It would’ve been more to put him in an actual urn, so—”
She snaps her head back. Mom says, “I paid over the phone,” she scratches at her neck, “they told me the payment went through and everything?”
I shake my head and say, “They charged me five hundred bucks.”
“Well, I don’t have that kind of cash just lying around here.” Mom’s voice shakes and she throws her hands up.
I catch her eyes with mine and ask, “How about a check?” My hands squeeze harder around Dad.
Mom pulls open a drawer, sifts around inside. She writes me a check and puts it in my hand, avoiding my eyes. She opens her mouth and breathes in, but before she can speak, I ask, “Do you want it?”
But my mother just turns around, she keeps sorting her mail.
As I make my way out of her house, I feel something on my legs, brushing my ankles, like a critter. I jump and look to the floor. A trail of ash pours out from a hole in the bag. It drops and sinks into Mom’s carpet like rain. I run out and leave the door open behind me.
In the car, the steering wheel brushes against the bag. A lump of rock-bone, of once-skeletal-structure, pokes into my thigh. And for second it feels good to have this bag pressed against me. This weight. This piece of bone sticking into me. The harder I squeeze, the more of him spills out.
Sweat pours down my face and the wind freezes it. At a red light, I try to throw the check from Mom to the passenger seat. When I lift my arms, grey and white ash waterfall from the bag down onto my lap and the center console. The smell of him, whiskey and leather, fills up the car, and I throw the ashes onto the passenger seat with the check.
A cloud of dust, ash body-mushroom clouds my car. I breathe in to yell fuck, but choke on the air and the dead-dad stuff. I cough ash and gag, eye-watering gags, and push and scrape and smack at my legs to try and get all the ash off, all of him, off of me, because it’s too much and he’s everywhere and the light turns green and a car behind me honks and my foot can’t find the pedal and I just scream for him to get off me, to get away from me, to let me go.
When most the ash is finally gone everything feels cold again.
My tires scrape against the curb outside my house. I turn off the car and get out, closing the door with my back. I walk around to the other side of the car and carefully take the bag of ashes out, leaving the check on the seat. More ash spills out onto the rain covered ground, turns into a dark, boney mud; unsalvageable. The grey trashcan lies there on its side, left alone and wrong by the garbage truck. I set the plastic bag of dad on the hood of my car, only a little powder-handful of him left. I pull the trashcan back upright.
I walk through the back gate towards the house to grab another bag to put the rest of dad in; a proper receptacle. And before I make it to the stairs of the patio, I see the rat’s grave. Chopsticks and Barbie bow. Kneeling down in the mud, the dew squeezes up through my jeans, to my knees. I push my fingers through the dirt that the rat is buried under and for a moment, I swear, there’s breathing.
The trashcan is empty, it’s insides off to somewhere where Doggy, my Barbies, my blankets, will all be burned or buried. All of the toys, the comfort things that I loved, once.
No prayers come to mind.
The street is lined with the neighbor’s empty trashcans, some knocked over too, some upright. I count them and get up to how old I was when dad stopped coming home.
And it was good.
I grab the bag of ashes from the hood of my car and it’s warm and for a moment, I swear, there’s a heartbeat. I rush the bag up to my ear to listen. Dust puffs out and chokes me again. Then I hear my car, still humming and trying to cool down. And he’s only warm from the hood; from the dying engine. He’s only rock and bone, and ash now.
I push the lid all the way open and drop what I have left of my dad inside.
It’ll be a week before he’s really gone.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Sunshine Barbito is a fiction writer. She currently lives in New York City. Her short stories have been showcased in many literary magazines, including "Glory of Love," which won first place in Ember Chasm Review's Fiction and Poetry Summer 2020 contest and was published in their third issue, "Baby," published by Sad Girl Lit, “Sleepover,” published by Fecund Magazine, and “Jump for Heart,” published by Prometheus Dreaming. Sunshine has worked as a freelance editor, collaborating on projects with Dark Horse Comics, including The Umbrella Academy and Fight Club 3. She spoke at a panel about crime stories in comics at the 2019 Portland Comic-Con, to promote her first series as sole writer, Mafiosa, which will be released by Dark Horse Comics in December 2021. To Sunshine, fiction is everything.