Free Psychopomp: A Novella by Heather Crews Page A

formaldehyde allowed. Did you ever suspect your fruits and vegetables were grown in a bed of human remains?”
    “No.”
    “Cremation is illegal too. The emissions were terrible for the environment.”
    “What’s cremation?” I asked.
    He turned and pointed to a door in the corner, almost obscured by the machine. “Look in there.”
    Eyeing him suspiciously, I started toward the door. He waved a hand, urging me on.
    The room was a closet, so long and narrow my hips nearly touched the edges of the floor-to-ceiling shelves. They were crammed with row upon row of copper canisters, dented and half-obscured under mounds of oxidation. Varying shades of teal and turquoise, hot pink, deep blue, pale yellow, and white looked to have exploded from the seams of the canisters like volcanic lava, forming corrosive patterns—swirls and deltas and melting stripes—that were both aversive and beautiful.
    Gabriel’s feet scuffed the floor behind me. “What is all this?” I asked.
    “They hold the ashes of asylum patients who were burned up inside a machine a long time ago. Cremains, they’re called. Clever word. No one ever claimed these people, and they were forgotten. I’m not sure anyone else knows they exist.”
    I looked around again, rapt, but I didn’t dare touch them. They were sacred somehow. Each of the canisters contained a whole person, so much matter reduced to fine bits of bone. Their bodies and memories were gone, and no one would ever know they’d existed. Their names remained on small labels stuck to the lids, a last chance against anonymity, but even some of those had rotted away.
    “Dust we are,” Gabriel quoted, “and to dust we shall return.”
    And that was apt, since the world was filled with dust anyway.
     

14. la noche
    In the tub, I scrubbed at my sweat-stained clothes and hung them to dry for morning. Then I dressed for sleep in the too-large clothes Gabriel had first given me. Briefly, I let my fingers trace over a tiny, purplish bump in the crook of my left elbow. It was a scar from having given plasma so many times. I wondered if it would ever fade.
    I took the bed again and Gabriel stretched out on the couch, all straight lines and sharp angles and messy hair. Pressing my back to the wall, I watched his dark form, but he never moved except to breathe.
    The mattress beneath me was hard, my blanket thin. I’d thought I would sleep better by myself, without Verm, but I missed his body. Never had I expected to, not for a second, but there, in the wash of moonlight from the transom, I did. I rolled onto my face and sobbed silently in the pillow. He wasn’t the thing I wanted, not really, and I hated this moment of weakness, this betrayal of myself.
    We’re all alone.
    Verm wouldn’t come after me. I couldn’t be worth that much to him.
    In the moldering library, I’d once read about a man who ventured to the underworld to bring his dead wife back to the upper world with him. The man wasn’t supposed to look back at her as they left but he did, and then she was gone from him forever. Another story told of a man and his family leaving a city of sin, guided by angels. The angels told them not to look back but the wife did, and she was transformed into a pillar of salt.
    It seemed to me nothing good ever came of looking back. So I was content to pretend I hadn’t existed before now.
    At some point I’d fallen asleep after all, and when I woke I knew the couch was empty. There were no whispers. It was still dark.
    I got out of bed and stuck my head out the door. My eyes tracked the blur of Gabriel’s white coat as he trekked up the hill toward the asylum. There were no lights on in the building.
    Disturbed, I got back in bed, burrowing beneath my blanket. Verm invaded my restless sleep, appearing to me as a toothy demon-god with eyes like cinders, cannibalizing my dreams.
    His desperate murmurs haunted me. Don’t ever leave me , he’d said. That one moment shared with him, deceptively