Jeez.. I'm being blown away by the prose writers today. This is a starkly beautiful piece, tragic without being sentimental - despite the fact that the scene it sets, the act of returning a loved one's ashes to the Earth/water, could easily be described as a sentimental one.

"The smudged, oil-soaked shadow of it on the too-small fridge in the never-quite-finished kitchen; because Bobbie’s dying took all the time out of the three of them." Just this one sentence tells so many stories. And then: "Then just her" tells a whole new set. This writing is rich with implications and reverberations, hits fast and hard and draws you all the way in without warning or apology.