The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Beautiful Outlaw by Jennifer Perrine

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ASHES

I keep my mother on the shelf. The urn fits my fingers, though I never pull it down. When I
received it, how weightless it felt, no different in size or heft from my bottle of pills, thirty
white discs settled to its bottom, so much volume unoccupied. In her vessel, does she reside
only in the tiniest line of dust, the rest just emptiness stretched over her? I refuse to let my
curiosity be piqued. I’ve never peered inside, not once through the sixteen months it’s posed

on that ledge, brazen, coaxing me to lift the lid, to find her reduced to grit. I’ve got only
a token bit of her in that jar. The balance remained with her boyfriend, who tipped it over
the bow of a borrowed boat. I don’t know where my mother would have wanted to go to while
away her afterlife, if floating then fading into the ocean would have been her choice. What
could I know? We avoided each other for a decade, then two, then three. We never quarreled,

or spat cruel names, or sat at a table in civil silence. We simply existed on our distant, separate
coasts. Now we’re so close. Fragments I could cradle, could carry around all day, instead stay
encased in black lacquer, cloaked in a baroque display of swirling gold vines. If I were bolder,
I’d keep some powder exposed in clear glass, as I would keep azaleas in a vase, a final trace of
perfume in a vial, jasmine tea forgotten in its pot, left to molder. I would inspect its contents

for chips, for shards, for a hint of what’s had its hooks in my throat. But I don’t want to hold
this handful of char, don’t want to follow my shrink’s instructions to conduct a ritual, to mix it
with dirt to nourish a sapling, or sow it across my yard for foraging juncos to find. I don’t
want to touch it to my lips, to sniff for a whiff of what’s past. I want a vigil: watchful nights
of brushing hair back to cloak a zigzag of scars, of tracking a somniloquy of dark moans to its

origin in her cluttered heart. I want to hunt down that juncture where we grew apart, her life
branching from mine. I’d pull free the axe that cleaved the tough bark of our bond, grind
that blade keen enough to hack at my ache, pulverize it to a fine particulate. I want to quit,
even for a minute, imagining we embraced at the end, unhurried, my face buried in her only
body. I want to forget how every day took her farther from me. How, even now, they take.

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