Plots by Glen Pourciau

         A few minutes into our phone conversation this afternoon my friend Christine broached the subject that was the reason for her call. For years she’s been helping care for her Aunt Arlette, who lives in a nursing home. She’d also helped care for Arlette’s deceased husband, Elias, whose ashes are now in a container stored in Arlette’s room. Christine has been asked to bury the ashes of Elias and Arlette in two burial plots they purchased outside of town. Arlette wants to wait until she dies and then have her ashes laid to rest at the same time as Elias’s. Christine hasn’t mentioned her idea to her husband, Ross, she said, because she doesn’t care to hear what he thinks.

         “Arlette and Elias are never going to know what happened to those plots after they die,” she told me. “Bodies need to be buried in graves but ashes do not. Ross and I don’t want to be cremated and I’m asking myself why go to the expense of buying two plots. I’m looking at it from a practical standpoint.”

         “You’re going to take them?”

         “I wouldn’t put it that way. How can we take them when we’re dead? Arlette barely knows who she is, so it wouldn’t help to talk to her about it. She wouldn’t know what I was saying, which puts me in the position of not being able to get her okay. There’s nothing I can do about that.”

         “What would you do with their ashes?”

         “They could be scattered anywhere. The plots would be put to better use if Ross and I were buried in them. I understand some people could see it as nervy and I’m interested to know how you see it.”

         “What if you take the plots but have their ashes scattered on your graves? You could add a marker for them or have words to that effect added on your headstones.”

         “Then I’d have to pay for the marker or to have the words added; and I don’t want visitors standing over our graves and thinking of other people. We’d also have their ashes in our house, looking over our shoulders, till we died.”

         “I think you should ask Ross if he has a problem being buried in ground intended for someone else.”

         “What’s he going to do? Refuse to be buried next to me? The plots are not in his family and I don’t see that he has a say in what happens to them.”

         “I have less say than he does.”

         “I’m not putting you in charge. I just hoped you’d say you agree with me.”

         “You won’t know what happened to them after you die either.”

         “Who’d have the nerve to take them from me?”

         “I can’t think of anyone,” I said.

Glen Pourciau‘s third story collection, Getaway, was published in 2021 by Four Way Books. His stories have been published by AGNI Online, Green Mountains Review, New England Review, New World Writing, The Paris Review, Post Road, The Rupture, and others.

8 September 2023