The ocean seems like the least attractive place to be a dead body. Water getting into everything, bloating your cells, teasing layers of skin apart. It’s a flabby, pallid burial, fish nibbling puny bites, everything inside of you chilled to jelly and oozing out in slow motion. The opposite of a mummification. I’d rather be wrapped up tight, left in the desert to dry. Shrinking in the arid chambers of an actual building, something someone made on purpose. (For all I know, the ocean’s an accident, a mistake, a by-product.) In the afterlife the mummies will be the supermodels, skin and flesh air-dried to their skeletons. The sea-buried freaks’ll have to develop sparkling personalities to get by.

But I know neither will actually apply to me. I’ll die and go into a box, down into the ground where it’s dark and quiet but solid and familiar—or into a flaming chamber and then a smaller box and into the air and then (shit) probably into the sea. I’ll end up as ash-mud on breakers, but I won’t be around to care.

When they cremate people, the artificial stuff inside them doesn’t burn. I bet they throw away huge boxes of awesome stuff from paupers’ cremations. All kinds of pacemakers and silver teeth and plates and pins from broken bones that set badly. When I go back to the Bad Place maybe I’ll make sculptures or jewelry from dead paupers’ unburned parts, the stuff that stuck around because it was made of different matter.

Two thoughts rush in fast. One is that they probably don’t say “pauper” anymore. They probably say “indigent” or something more PC and less Dickens. The other is a kind of self-scolding: stop thinking about them. They’re alive. Somewhere. And I’ll never see them again. They’re not in boxes; they’re on a bus or a train or a boat. Their flesh and fillings are in the same place—my mother’s skin, smooth and tight over her cheekbones, my dad’s forearm muscles and big hands, graying sideburns and gray-brown eyes.