Newfangled

He’d dreamed a lot about his end as a grey crackling, loud and deliberate. Between them they were sure it was a fire. When the building’s fire alarms went off, preceded by makeshift orange and yellow visions of her own, it was a return to a life of sorts. A fate the colour of smoke. What she thought is that maybe he’d seen his own cremation. They were both wrong.

It had been time enough if you asked anyone. She wasn’t in a hurry for a date nor had she planned it but it had been organised and she’d been a willing part of it. A Friday, the week closed out and the open weekend ahead. It was nearby of course, somewhere Suzanne and Tomas had been together many times, and that was why she’d picked it. Comfort and walking distance. Friday’s Frank was not a stranger but a loose acquaintance, an arms-length reintroduction who’d himself gone through a separation — different, of course — many years ago.?

“It’s just a chance to get to know someone new,” Kerrilee had told Suzanne when she’d introduced them.

Suzanne had taken her up on it and dressed to the eights and she was early enough, she thought, to get a drink of her own with which she could sit along the street before the road that gave way to the shallow carpark beyond which was the ocean. There she would drink and remember and then begin to forget.

“Where’s Tomas?” the bartender, twenty-something, had asked as she’d ordered. Had it really been so long?

She told him as she ordered something, anything, but gin.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“Thank you.”

The young barman would tell that story on dates for a few years before he would, himself, settle down and be one day too not an urn but a headstone beneath the grass. That was a moment he used as a gauge. A loss he was afraid to confess to the loosely familiar.?

Suzanne retreated then for a short time back to a seat at bench with nothing really and no one here to look at. Frank saw her a moment before they’d agreed, coming from the other way she would go home.

“Good evening,” he said as came in over across the view. He knew like everyone else but apparently the barkeep. He excused himself to the bar from which he would soon return. “I’ll get a drink.”

“Frank?” Suzanne asked behind him.

“Suzanne?”

“Might I have another?”

His smile was broad and well-rehearsed but no less sincere. “Of course.”

Upon his return they stayed here at the bench and the bar staff came to them. The sunset before them turned the sky orange and the ocean through the trees to darkness before the horizon pulled down a purpling curtain that ripped the fire from the day. The moonlit sea washed in and washed out as it had for longer than either of them could really understand.?

Seven days later: same time, different place. It was nearby too but it was a restaurant not a pub, modern fusion, a neutral palette, upscale, and he paid. They talked more and more and it was not any of it a rehash. It became a long dinner as the place closed around them but still their houses were on lock. Well, Frank could have been persuaded and for Suzanne it was not so much a policy as a precaution. The night drew on and the deepening cool when they finally had to leave had them retreat into each other and then, at their parting, themselves. They made plans for sooner than they might have otherwise. Suzanne’s precautions came down and she felt like she was much less alone here in the waning hours. Sunday night, then. Again the same time and again elsewhere. But this time: Suzanne’s. She would cook. Frank would help. He would bring the wine.

She did and he did. Shiraz for himself and a pinot grigio for Suzanne while she made impressive fish with delicious staples. Just after she’d finished cooking, when Frank was laying out plates, the dining table in the middle of her apartment became, suddenly, just hers, just for a moment. Tomas, she was sure, had let them be. He’d seen himself out as Frank had arrived and he had taken himself in spirit down to the water to sit in the sand and listen to the sea and Suzanne, unlike how she’d been so much before but like she was coming to terms with never needing to do again, didn’t worry about him at all. He would be back. But…

They did not finish the bottles. There was no need nor was there time. They retreated to the bedroom already only half-clothed, the warm air inside thick with desire. Inside they were upright only a moment. They didn’t fall into the sheets or the pillows but instead into each other and into loose flesh and a rhythm and pleasure as the bed rocked as it once used to. What it didn’t used to do was third but Suzanne that was, was, was —?absent from her everything now but here and a rising peaking holding and then: release.

They stayed that way afterwards, uncovered and entangled. Suzanne could only look at the ceiling. Frank could look everywhere, drinking it all in brand new. Locking away the details for recollection later not as gossip but as a keepsake with which he would hope —?hope, he told himself —?to surprise her. Suzanne expected the fan to be spinning like it always did when Tomas had entered the room. Still association. The smells unusual. Unbroken heat in the air. Sweat on their skin and calming hearts. Her breathing returned to her slow and she came back to herself entirely, aware now of being naked and conscious and so she stood and strode across the room like she’d not perhaps ever done before. She was something fresh in her own skin even now at her age and Frank watched, feeling the same but more familiar with it for time and distance and some repetition. She turned the fan on to where it’d always been. It cut through the warmth and bit at their bodies.

“A little fast?” Frank asked, shrinking beneath the rapid blades.

“Oh,” Suzanne said, halfway back to bed, and she couldn’t help but look to and then past Frank and back down and she saw it. Well, she didn’t see it. She scooped up fast her top from the floor and slipped it around her shoulders and her chest and ran to the other side of the bed to where Tomas in his urn had slipped from the table in the throes and spilled ash upon the carpet.

“Oh,” she repeated, unsure what else to do as Frank noticed her noticing and stepped to it. He was perhaps only temporary but that place in a personal pantheon is because of what you do or don’t do and he knew that and he had learned it the hard way before. Tomas upon the carpet was not strictly his but it kind of was in the way that the hard things are the necessary things for getting to where you want to be. Finding someone’s vacuum cleaner is generally a straightforward exercise but with high pressure, loud cabinets, and then a grotesque whine at this hour, it can be something difficult to sort through. Suzanne’s was in the laundry standing up but to find that out Frank had to venture out fast, naked, out into the living room and across the kitchen and towards the cabinets, pantries, other doors. He looked for recessed access, for anything at all. He’d seen the bin beneath the kitchen sink earlier while they were cooking so his plan was half-materialised but the other part he was sort of making up as he went along which is much of how he did it all. In truth, he was unsure what else to do. Suzanne kneeling by what was left of Tomas crossed not for a second his mind until he was there, machine whirring, reaching in over the top of her.?

It made a sound like a crackling whirr.

“No!” Suzanne called, batting Frank and his stick Dyson — her stick Dyson — away. Ash fell from its plastic baleen as the maw raised from the ground. She half-stood as Frank leaned back in — “Wait, wait!” he protested — and began to push with her hands against the grain of the carpet to condense the dark grey and so to coalesce it the way she thought best. She stood the urn up on the carpet too then, noticing instead still some of what was left of him, and she scooped it back in with her imperfect hands into a too-small memorial and she found him further scattering to the fibres. She did not notice the tears. Frank did.?

He turned off the vacuum, still convinced by it, and he knelt beside her as she cried and scraped and scooped and gave herself a carpet burn that would turn her too to ash if she was left to put him all back away that way. Frank’s hands lowered down onto hers and his steady breathing brought hers back into line, skin on skin across their arms before the dress interceded about the shoulders. She relented, she relaxed, but she did not stop crying. Nor did he think she would need to.?

Frank returned to the vacuum cleaner, rehearsed not strictly in this but in something similar, and he took the chamber he’d already emptied from the machine and shook it over the urn into which Tomas seemed to fall like he belonged. What was left of him that lingered on the ceramic edges where it had been dumped with ineffective meaning might have looked on with perhaps jealousy but more likely with something like relief. Suzanne saw and just cried on as Frank returned the contraption to the machine. He lowered the force of the vacuum a touch so it still clung to the detritus amongst the short, rough, brown fibres of the bedroom carpet, and he hoovered up poor absent old Tomas and, done, he poured him back into the urn.?

When they would think about it again a little more logically what was returned to the vase was imperfect — dust and hairs and things and bits and pieces — but having built the place and this having always been his side of the bed it was now more of him than it was before maybe. That was a nicer idea. Frank shut the lid of the urn and handed it to Suzanne before retreating himself to get changed opposite Suzanne, now standing beside him, for what would be the first time among many.