Particulate Matter by Rigel Oliveri
Life goes on, the old adage claims, but in her flash fiction, “Particulate Matter,” Rigel Oliveri asks: How? Here, a widowed spouse contemplates the cremation of their husband, wondering how we are meant to reconcile everyday reality with the enormity of loss. After the passing of a loved one, as life refills with errands and tasks, how do we keep that person in our consciousness? In this story, Oliveri places a thumb directly on the pressure point between the existential and the mundane. Through her protagonist’s attempts to quantify and qualify loss, that ache becomes both all and nothing. We come away with a glimpse of the way life and death intertwine; the pressure of loss and the ache of moving forward. —CRAFT
It is the one-year anniversary of the day your husband’s body was cremated and you are at the Jefferson Middle School Fall Orchestra Concert.
Here’s a fact: The funeral home people don’t normally tell the bereaved when a cremation is going to happen, because they don’t even know until the day of. This has something to do with death certificates and bureaucracy. Which means that last year around this time you spent a week searching an impossibly blue October sky wondering if that was the day. If right then his body was on fire, releasing him into the atmosphere. Maybe you were already inhaling him and you didn’t even know it.
You went to the funeral home to pick up the ashes. Someone had left the office door open and you could see a whiteboard on the wall with the week’s schedule. There was your husband’s last name and cremation date, two days before. You thought back to what you had done on that particular day: packing lunches, the Social Security Office, avoiding your neighbors’ eyes, three glasses of wine, standing in the doorway squinting at the sun.
And then you were gasping in the funeral home parking lot, with cars whizzing by on the Business Loop. Staring at the box in your hands and thinking of the callus on his left thumb that you used to run your own thumb over. The mole on his collarbone. Where they went.
Here’s another fact: Cremains are not ashes at all, but powdered bone matter.
Now it has been a year since the date on that whiteboard, which means the board has been erased fifty-two times to make room for more names. Which also means that of all the people in the world, only you know what happened on this date.
Why would you even need a calendar with the sky this crushingly blue.
The violins—your son included—are sawing away at the theme from Ghostbusters, and your daughter is sticky-faced and squirming beside you. It’s hot and close in the auditorium, too late in the year for air conditioning in a public school. The woman next to you is wearing lotion that smells like a flower that never existed. Someone behind you must have bathed in cigarette smoke. At home you are out of milk and the leaves need raking. Your throat closes and your eyes squeeze shut.
Here are some final facts, in case it makes a difference: Particles disperse in the air at an average speed of 350 meters per second. The calcium phosphates and potassium in bone make it an excellent fertilizer. The sky is always blue up there, even when you can’t see it.
He is gone. He is everywhere. You are here. The audience is applauding.
Open your eyes now. It’s time to breathe in.
RIGEL OLIVERI is a law professor who lives in Columbia, Missouri, with her two children and four cats. She writes fictions, essays, and plays. Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review and Streetlight Magazine, and has been performed by the Greenhouse Theater Project. In 2021 her short story, “Totality,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Featured image by Riefki Nugraha, courtesy of Unsplash.
