For hours in the moonless dark, Dune had fed the fire, keeping the flames rising. She’d been quiet as she tended the pyre, nauseous at times, a sense of burning up inside herself. A new feeling. An unbearable yawning emptiness. She knew that if she let it become a sound, this raging vacuous heat would undo her bones. Even when a longing to wail had possessed her small body, she kept it internal.

Now, in the hush of morning, she wondered if anyone had seen her, smelled her fire, heard her. Detroit nights were full of wild sounds.

The coming day was unfolding in bruised steel and lilac as she slipped out the back door and crossed the wild grasses of the yard to the fire pit. The sun reached its own small flames across the under-ridges of cloud. Dune crouched, sifting her long fingers through the ashes, still warm in places, unaware at first of what she was doing.

Kama had often spoken of being cremated into a seed pod for a tree or mushrooms, something that continued as earth, something that would grow.

Dune had read everything the internet could tell her about cremation. Four nights before Kama died, Dune ended up down a rabbit hole of pyre stories. She’d read some of the history aloud to her absent mother, partially for some accountability, mostly knowing her mother would appreciate the drama.

Burning was the best way to dispose of bodies that died mysteriously, according to a random comment on a pyre video. Commercial cremation left nothing behind, but outside of a furnace it was hard to get the fire hot enough to truly burn everything away. Cremation wasn’t meant to happen in backyards, in the middle of cities. But Dune didn’t trust the system, which had sent her mother home, to attend to this sacred work.

Dune had pulled concrete blocks and a square of stone into a kind of open-air oven. For the base of the pyre, she had used some wood her late father had purchased for a deck he’d never quite started. The sentimental wood had leaned against the side of the house for a decade, wrapped in tarps.

The fire had burned for more than six hours, her mother disappearing inside it.

Dune was grateful no one had come around, grateful their yard faced an empty building. Grateful now to have no witnesses as she dragged her hands through the soft pile, seeking.