The World’s Other Side

In Japan, when you die, they wheel what’s left of you out of the incinerator, and what’s left of your family takes turns picking with special chopsticks. It looks like they have gathered to dine over a dead campfire, but they are not, of course, eating you. They are feeding you to the round mouth of an urn: only in pieces, Father, to the fire. In their bright swimsuits, my daughters spill warm sand over my skin as I lie still, watching the sun needle the sky. The baby licks her fingers to tell, perhaps, if I am ready, her bald head white with lotion, her mouth full of vowels. The older one says nothing above the ocean’s slow rush, but scoops and pats to get me done and gone. I’ve never been to Japan, but once, a globe of glass found me at the clear end of a wave. It drifted from the other side, my mother said. Cold and slick, it glistened as I held it up with both hands and looked through to the green flames of the sun before tasting the salt with my tongue.