Snap, Crackle and Pop

I was late again today. 10 minutes. The boss’ll have my ass for sure, I thought. Fuck him. I took off my jacket and threw on my smock. “Hey Pete! Can you tie me up in the back?” I washed up and went into the next room. The fire was already blazing. The body on the slab was naked and the fire was famished. It had a never-ending appetite and was hotter than hell. I pushed the body in and closed the hatch. The fire roared and turned orange. I remember the one time Pete locked me in here for kicks, while a body was burning. The snaps and the pops of the flesh and fat sizzling; the crack of the bones snapping in the intense heat. It stuck with me, bothered me… but not as much as when I had to slide that beautiful girl in. Gorgeous little girl. Couldn’t have been more than 7. So still on the slab. She almost looked asleep; her arms crossing her chest. I couldn’t do it. The boss called Pete in to do it. After she “reduced”, as that asshole liked to call it, he told me to sweep her up and put her ashes into an empty urn. I didn’t. The fuck suspended me for a week without pay. This was my second day back. Two days. Twice late.

It’d been about 45 minutes. He should be “reduced” by now. I went in and swept him up into a waiting urn. The shards of bone that didn’t burn down and glowed a bright red would be thrown out with the rest of the trash at the end of our shift, after they cooled. If the city ever found out, there’d be heads rolling. The boss didn’t care. He wanted them gone. The trash-man already hated picking up our trash without knowing what it contained. He said it gave him the creeps to pick up trash from the “grim reapers”.

The disquieting thought once again came to mind. I thought of how my own body would burn; history rendered beneath scorched skin. The hot memories of love and hate sizzling and bursting open. The snap and crackle of all I’d ever done, concluded. The hiss of all I’d ever wished for, released. The happiness, the fears pooling bittersweet beneath charred flesh. All those years, the sum of it all- reduces to ash. A large sandwich baggie worth of dust in the bottom of a cold urn.