It was Friday night and Andrew was still waiting for the doctor’s call to confirm that he was, in fact, becoming ash. His stomach sensed the Friday night ritual was underway and churned, not so much with hunger as existential yowl. God, how he felt cavernous.

Flour, water, salt, and yeast were just beginning to slosh around in the wobbly mixer, white dust rising quickly and falling gently and settling around the edges of the bowl and the green formica countertop.

He looked to the living room, to the makeshift wooden mantel above the gas fireplace, and felt a pang in his gut. He stopped the mixer, limped to the silver urn on the slightly sloping cherry wood shelf and looked inside, his throat a collapsing tunnel as he swallowed hard.Just this morning, he’d vowed to quit. While staring at illustrations of bisected hearts and lungs with their purpling pink flesh and orangy vessels or veins or aortas, he had listened to the doctor discuss some kind of organic degeneration and explained, “I eat a lot of bread.”

The doctor chuckled, then answered,“It’s not a gluten thing.”

“Oh,” Andrew said, starting to correct him, wanting to say more. But he let the doctor move on, declaring that despite his leg and too many pain meds, a generally healthy forty-three year-old man doesn’t develop such strange symptoms, nobody does really. Andrew chimed in again, “I understand.”

The doctor threw him a challenging do you really glare, then watched the ultrasound screen with a puzzled expression. Andrew’s stomach, intestines, and lungs were eroding: the meshy organs slowly releasing floating flecks like old ruins snowing their own dust.“I want to consult with a colleague, and will call you before the end of the day,” the doctor said, struggling with his lack of vocabulary for this internal desiccation that Andrew could have called self-cremation but remained silent,offering only a shake of his head as if he, too, was bewildered. “We’ll talk about treatments.” The idea that this condition could be treated surprised Andrew. He hadn’t come for a cure, only confirmation. But for at least the thousandth time, he told himself he would stop.

Andrew carried the urn back to the kitchen, plopped down on the kitchen chair’s sighing green cushion, and rubbed his tired eyes. He opened the urn, scooped a tablespoon of ash, and sprinkled it over the dough.

The inspiration came in the form of a letter a few months after Andrew’s friend died in a car accident. As he sifted the mail sorting out the last details of David’s modest estate, between attorney bills and insurance claims he found a square envelope marked with a Colorado address he recognized: the small town where his father lived, a town he hadn’t thought much about since Dad passed decades ago. The letter was short, from his cousin.

Andrew:

I hope you’re well. I thought you might enjoy this story I found in the cellar. It’s one of Grandpa’s. I don’t know if you knew he wrote stories, apparently this is the only one that survived. I’m making gin in his old shop now if you ever make it out this way I’d love to share it with you.

Matthew

Andrew laughed at the letter, trying to remember Matthew, what he once had been and was now. Some kind of big-fish-small-pond athlete now turning that pondwater into gin? He recalled being taller but weaker than Matthew when they were children, before Mom moved them to Arizona trying to become strangers to the Witter clan.

He unfolded the lined notebook pages ad began reading the story that started all his hunger.

There was a woman who lived down the road from wherever you live. (I knew her as Great Aunt Martha.) She was the woman you saw on every passing day, during your errands at the market, during your visit to the church, during your walk after supper. She was plainly pretty and commonly familiar: nothing remarkable in any way. Except that she was exceedingly thin.

Everyone knew the woman had lost her husband and children in a terrible tragedy, but they didn’t know the details.After they had all burned up in a fire at her husband’s print shop, without much bodily remains to recover, the woman visited the dusty heap where her family had died, huddled together. There, unconcerned by the onlookers’ judgments, she wept as she filled a vase with ash.

Something Andrew would never know: was this all part of his lineage? This Great Aunt Martha he’d never heard of, had she sparked this streak of hunger? Inherited or not, it was now his appetite to sate. And he enjoyed it. For the past eight months, each Friday afternoon — after surviving another week of leading middle school bands and orchestras — Andrew would eagerly head home to bake bread. It started as a simple urge, and he understood it clearly. A brief reprieve from the weight of his grief; somehow it eased his deep yearning to see David again, to be near him again, again, again. While waiting for the golden crust to form on the rising loaf, he would catalogue the ants and other invasive species he could find: a host of random spiders and a few persistent cockroaches, plus fruit flies and gnats, slithery silverfish, occasional carpet beetles. He’d learned a little of how to appreciate these little creatures from his closest, only, friend. David, the stellar athlete Andrew’s cousin could’ve only dreamed of becoming; David, the award-winning entomologist who could describe ants dragging their gasters with the passion of a love sonnet; David, the ashen heap inside the silver vessel on his mantle.

They had been friends since meeting as state college roommates, two apparent opposites forced together despite David studying biology and Andrew studying music. David was attractive and extroverted, while Andrew was a homely shut-in by comparison. Their friendship bloomed on a shared love of philosophical conversation sprinkled over classical music and a common aversion to the school’s party culture. They carried their friendship through the ups and downs of their twenties and thirties, spent weekends in the mountains to the north hiking and drinking wine and commiserating about employment and love and the lack of love or even hope for it and religious trauma and being misunderstood, their conversations so loud and boisterous that their voices soared through the black sky to the bluing edges of the valley where they became whispers of unspoken guilt or shame or hopes or dreams.

Their weekly mountain getaways became monthly then sporadic after David married Anna when he turned 32. By that time, as he watched David shrivel under the weight of Anna’s demanding ego, Andrew had already convinced himself he was better off single.

Andrew ruined his leg on their last hiking trip together. While looking through binoculars, he shuffled a couple of steps to the side and slipped off a sandy rock, crashing five feet below and fracturing his tibia and fibula. Red-faced from anger and embarrassment, he tried to laugh and walk it off, leaning heavily on his trekking poles as David, after making sure Andrew was okay and concealing his laughter, finished a story about what happens when an ant colony gets damaged in a storm. “It’s remarkable, how precise the ants are,” he said, as Andrew strained to climb the last 100yards to a summit they’d reached 28 times. He didn’t want to interrupt to mention the searing pain though it felt like a shard of bone was trying to saw its way out, didn’t know he was damaging all kinds of nerves. “They haul fallen fruit to their nest,” David said, “it’s amazing how they cooperate. They keep going when humans like us, we just won’t. Or can’t.”

They reached the summit and Andrew hid the agony as well as he could and sat down, hating himself for how he had never figured out how to be vulnerable even with David. Golden rays bounced off David’s sunglasses as he added with a kind of obsession, “they rebuild by zeroing in on an energy-rich food source that can sustain them until they have the stability they need to recover and grow again.” After a moment of nodding to himself, David paused and added, “I’m just rambling now.”

“No,” Andrew said, “it’s fascinating.” He had always marveled at his friend’s knowledge, wishing, as he so often did, that he had such stories to tell. His work stories amounted to boys farting in tubas and catching the fallen scraps of parental gossip about each others’ children and the too-single-for-their-taste band teacher who must have something to hide.

Taking in the view below of tan clay and red rocks tumbling their way down together to greet green shrubbery, David changed the subject. “I didn’t want to just spring it on you… but… Anna is leaving me.” A kind of reflux rose in Andrew’s throat from the shock as David continued. She’d met someone, said David was aloof and never made her feel the way she wanted. Andrew, seeking any kind of escape from whatever swirl of sorrow and relief he felt for his friend, tried to stretch his leg. The pain was excruciating but he did his best to hide it, to let David have this moment.

They sat together picking at trail pebbles and the philosophical scraps of hope still to be found in middle age before David noticed how awfully swollen Andrew’s leg was. “Holy shit,” he said. His sudden alarm made Andrew nervous, and he felt everything from shame to joy as David insisted he carry him, piggyback, down the entirety of the dusty red trail.

As they went, David asked Andrew to stop apologizing about Anna, about the marriage, about the leg. “Tell me something good,” he said, “tell me something about the song.” Leg throbbing,heart stretching in some strange sideways sense, Andrew talked about his symphony, how he was struggling with the cello part, how he felt like there was a real possibility that this composition could catch on. Breathless, David remarked, “I’m sure this will be the one.”

Andrew let his hope and pain mingle like their sweat, soaking together through their thin tank-tops.

After they escaped the trail, David sat with Andrew in the hospital and then took him home. Andrew apologized again about his leg, about Anna, about all the ways life is just so happenstantially stupid. David, looking off in the distance as if barely tethered to earth, said with a kind of forced smile, “Just a simple rainstorm can destroy lacewings’ egg clusters. It leaves them all scattered. But a lacewing doesn’t sit there stewing, it just begins following chemical cues, searching for aphid colonies, looking for an ideal site for new eggs.” David patted Andrew’s cast as they sat on the faux leather couch in Andrew’s apartment, a setting they would share almost nightly for the next four months while David sorted out his divorce. David smiled. “It’s like we all have this instinct for resilience: every destruction is an opportunity.”

The next accident would changeeverything, and Andrew wouldn’t be so resilient.

The woman wept for weeks without eating or drinking, save for a single glass of water every morning. She spent the days pacing back and forth in the room cursing God for her loss. Then one evening, while listening to the radio to distract herself, she heard an evangelist tell the story of Jesus inviting his disciples to eat his flesh and drink his blood. (“Do this in remembrance of me,” Jesus told his disciples the night of his arrest.) The woman cried harder than she ever had before. Then, as the program ended, she stood and faced the crucifix over her fireplace. Without taking her eyes from the cross, she opened the urn, scooped out a handful of ash, and ate it.

           That night she dreamed of her children. They ran to her and asked her to read them astory. She saw her husband in the distance, working in a field and watching his family with deep love in his eyes.

           The next morning she drank a glass of water, sat beside the fire, walked around the neighborhood passing by you and me and everyone else on earth, and then returned home. She opened the urn, ate another handful of ashes, and dreamed again of her family.

           Every night she consumed them, they returned to her. They were real and bright and full of fleshy comfort and she squeezed them and loved them.

           Every morning they were gone.

Andrew gave up trying to rehabilitate his leg the day David died in the car crash. He couldn’t bear to focus on trying to walk or run again after David swerved into an oncoming truck. (There was no clear cause, the officer said, but there must’ve been something in the road. Lord, there must have been, he added.) David bled out waiting for the ambulance while the truck driver wept beside his jackknifed trailer.

At the morgue, after Anna asked forAndrew to go identify David, he ran to the table and wept over his friend’s sinewy body. He felt his leg scream with pain as he squatted down to the floor while wondering why someone so good, so bright, so kind, had to suffer and die alone out there on a dark highway. He leaned harder on his leg and let it growl as he wondered if David thought of him in those last moments, if he thought of anything at all. And he kicked at a wall, let the pain surge while his closest friend, the only love he’d ever known, lay so peacefully.

Just days before his death David had revised his will, leaving everything to Andrew. This was no boon, only another administrative burden to bear under the weight of all the loss. Anna, shocked but distant, offered help but added she was so busy with her new photography business. So with nothing but a song and a summer break to endure alone, it fell to him to make all the arrangements.

He chose cremation, chose the urn, chose his friend’s finality. He wanted to scatter David on one of their favorite mountains, and told himself someday he would. But between his leg and his refusal to believe David was truly gone, only one option made sense: keepDavid near, and ensure he would never be alone again.

The first time he ate David’s ashes, he made banana bread.It was serendipitous, he thought, to receive Grandpa’s story and to, after obsessing over the idea for days, discover a video about the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon. A well-dressed professor sat on a stool in front of his sleepy students and spoke of a tribe that covers a loved one’s body in leaves and let sit rest for at least a month in the forest, then cremate and collect the ashes, powdering the bones, to mix into a banana mush. “Now get this,” the professor cheered, “This soup is shared by the community in a final rite. They believe that eating the ashes helps the deceased’s spirit stay alive within the tribeand reach peace in the spirit world.”

Andrew had considered making the soup but thought banana bread would be better. The idea was more terrifying than he wanted to admit, but he gathered the ingredients and turned up Bach, which also helped to drown out the stomping feet in the apartment above.

He mixed the bananas with sugar and eggs, added flour until it formed a smooth batter. Took the urn and scooped outa teaspoon. Paused, looked inside. This was all there was of the greatest man he’d ever known, and he thought what an awful, stupid end for a demigod, what meaningless lives we all lead. He set aside his anger, told himself instead to breathe deep and hold onto the love he felt, never let it sour. Upon inhaling, the bright and rich aroma from the pale yellow batter roused his senses, and even made him laugh a little at the irony: David hated bananas.          

The brown loaf baked flatter than expected and more crumbly than he’d hoped but he ate it heartily in the quiet apartment. As he finished, he spotted one ant scuttling across the floor toward a stray crumb. He watched with pleasure as the little guy discovered the crumb and began dragging his gaster, secreting pheromones to alert his family to the bread.

The ant left a glowing orange trail in his wake. Its scent wafted and stirred with the aroma of the banana bread.Andrew could smell David and even sense him there. For the briefest moment he heard David singing like he used to in the shower, slightly off-key and louder than he realized, the guttural belting of the ridiculously mediocre pop song “Say Something” causing Andrew’s heart to swell with the chorus.

The next week Andrew discovered a regular loaf of bread baked better. Using a heaping tablespoon of ash, he baked the same bread — a small round loaf of spongy sourdough with a marbled crust that was lightly dusted with flour — each Friday afternoon and spent the evening eating it with a glass (sometimes a bottle) of red wine. It was good, if slightly dry, but nothing salted butter couldn’t solve. The meal provided the effect of a joy halo, a bit of hope in an increasingly brutal world.

And as he ate, he charted the progress of the sugar ants carving a valley through the yellowed linoleum flooring, a foraging trail traveling to and from whatever spillage existed beside the refrigerator. A new branch had broken off, making its way up the wall, to the top of the wainscotting, across to the bread box on the countertop. He couldn’t bring himself to sweep them away, spray the perimeter walls, call pest control, or even mop the floor; didn’t want to do anything but let them take over, in case they were each carrying some small crumb of David’s soul. Andrew spoke to them gently, “What kind of treasure do you think you’ll find here?”

           One Friday night he heard David whisper to him, thank you for remembering me.

           It spurred a memory of being a boy in church and craving the little wafers and wine. “I remember you,” he said, then he began to laugh as tears fell down his plumping cheeks. “This is our communion,” he said to David, and as he spoke a golden glow formed and quickly faded in the living room. He felt his heart flush and thump and he shivered, a hint of the nerves he had when David first came to stay with him after his divorce.

Soon, evenings weren’t enough. She skipped the water in the morning and ate her family instead, bringing them to life in the living room:she watched her babies dance and sing and her husband filet a fish he’d caught. She told them stories about the future and they told her all her stories would come true.

           Midday, she would take her daily walk. She would pass by people who would smile and nod and barely recognize her. She was getting thinner every day but people didn’t notice.

           One day, she woke and lifted her urn. It was nearly empty. She licked her fingers, swept the bottom of the clay jar, and licked the ash clean. Her children and husband came to her once more. Usually, she cheered for them and was so happy to see them. But on this day, she cried. “I will never see you again,” she said, her hands shaking.

           Her children smiled, her husband laughed. “No,” they said. “Today, you will see us forever.”

When the doctor finally called, Andrew was still sitting at the table, urn beside the mixer, tears dripping down his face as he promised himself this was his last communion. The doctor admitted that neither he, nor any of his colleagues, had a good explanation or idea of how to treat Andrew.

“My daughter has a little zen garden,” he said. “The sound in your lungs sounds like her raking the sand.”

“It feels like something’s falling through me all the time,” Andrew replied. Like sand slipping through my hands, he thought but didn’t say. Like he’d become an hourglass, counting down his days. He choked up, realizing how awful that truth felt. It wasn’t the falling ash inside, it was the idea that he, himself, felt like he was always falling, too. An endless outpouring of the soul.

“You see a lot of things,” the doctor said solemnly. “In this case, I truly cannot say if this is reversible.”Andrew nodded, thought of how nodding felt ridiculous but still offered no verbal response. The doctor added, “I poured over everything, trying to make sense of whether there was a mistake.” Andrew remained quiet, recalling a time from his childhood when he imagined receiving a call just like this, a doctor saying you only have days to live as the doctor continued, “We still have many options. And I want you to know I am committed to finding the cause, and, hopefully, a treatment.”

Gazing out the small, splotchy window, Andrew watched the handful of pedestrians three stories below crawl the streets on their way to meet friends, to grab takeout, to find love. He imagined all the times he’d walked those same streets alone, how he now limped those blocks of concrete and smelled the mix of sewage and Mexican food and industrial fabric softener, and he wondered if anyone noticed how thin he’d become.

“I eat a lot of bread,” he said again. And again, he wanted to say more.

The doctor chuckled. “I still don’t think it’s a gluten issue.”

A deep breath gave Andrew the sensation of cards spilling from a deck. “Is there anything you can prescribe for disintegration?”

He wondered what the doctor was thinking as he, now, was the one falling silent. Finally, the man replied, “I,um—”

“Thank you, doctor.” Andrew hung upas the doctor started to speak.

In the quiet kitchen, staring at the shaggy dough that already had a tablespoon of ash, Andrew tipped the urn over the mixing bowl. He patted it as if burping a baby until at least half a cup fell in. He gasped at first, seeing how much. But as the mixer slowly incorporated David’s ashes, turning the dough a light gray, Andrew closed his eyes and prayed, “I wish we had something more to remember.”

The bread rose a little higher tonight, and the ants marched quickly to and fro, eager to try the newest recipe. As Andrew indulged, chewing the crunchy crust and pillowy sponge, he felt warmer and warmer, a kind of glow beginning to emanate from him like a lamp, until, across the table, David appeared.

He smiled his beautiful smile with those dimples dotting the thin scruffy beard that framed his sharp features, and Andrew felt his nose flare and burn and his eyes water and the light behind David was nearly blinding but somehow Andrew could see him clearly, so easily, and oh hell what was this ravenousness he felt?

           David sat and talked with Andrew for hours. Not in any language we know, but some kind of heavenly bow drawing back and forth across celestial strings, the friction becoming sound — warm, resonant waves rising from a cello’s hollow heart. Each stroke shaped a shifting landscape of tension and release, like breath becoming music becoming language, and in that tonal bloom they harmonized line by line, image by image, until something felt understood, words suddenly known with the same tactile truth as tracing your fingers across the knots of a spine or drawing hearts on a steamy window. It was the language that unites us all, causes us to forget ourselves and see only the other, and they spoke until they had nothing left to say, agreeing that it felt so strange to be with each other again, agreeing they missed each other so.

Andrew admitted he wanted David back here now, and David spoke of how he missed his body and it was one thing Andrew could never understand, he always felt so ambivalent about flesh, about the thrilling pains it endures, and how the mind’s pain is even worse. Then, justas Andrew was about to finally tell David something more true than anything he’d ever said, David noticed the ants. He told them he was happy to see them, told them to keep doing their good work. He looked up to Andrew and said, “They are bringing a peace offering.” Smiling, he added, “You see, they don’t just take. They give so much, too.”

           As the evening waned, the glow began to fade and so did David.

           Sensing some urgency, Andrew asked, “Why did you have to go?”

           David looked away, out the window. “I don’t know if I will ever be able to answer that.” Then he leaned forward. “I want you to finish your symphony. Promise me.”

Andrew nodded.

“I’m leaving now,” David said. “Is it for good?”

Andrew, dizzied and undone, nodded.“Yes,” he said, though he still wasn’t sure.

And with that, David flickered and vanished, leaving only a watery glimpse through tears. On the stereo a cello’s voice rang out, and Andrew laughed. Isn’t this the end we all face anyway, the cello sang, ashes to ashes? Oh the hell of whatever this is, Andrew thought as he sat in the dark, the hell of every kind of hunger.

           No one ever saw the woman again. She would walk past them every day, in the markets, at church, on the roadside, but they couldn’t see her. She was nothing but a thing host, invisible to all but her own family. And she was full.

After the music stopped, Andrew sliced another piece of bread, smeared butter across it, thick like peanut butter, knowing this bite may be hard to choke down. As he started to take a bite, he noticed the ants had suddenly stopped as well. All of them, frozen there. He set the bread down on the table and looked at the loaf, at the glass of wine, at the urn out of place, and imagined Jesus and his disciples sitting around the dinner table, how different it must have been from what all those people do every week in church. It was no ritualistic nibbling at the edges of enlightenment; it was one great feast, one last goodbye.

Andrew realized now, perhaps too late, he was full. He didn’t know if he could reverse course and rebuild his body, but he wanted to try. Living, he sensed for the first time in years, felt urgent, necessary. There was music in him yet to be made.

He turned on David’s Sad But True Indie Pop playlist, then made his way to the oven. He set it to 400degrees, placed the rest of the bread back inside, and let it burn. Then, limping to the sink, he poured the wine down the drain. The crimson splashes stained the white sink.

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