The Cinder of June

The journal began as a way to keep the days straight after the funeral. I wrote in it every evening, sitting at the Formica table in the kitchen of our little house on Marshwood Lane, while the kettle ticked on the stove and the dog, Nero, a patchy old collie, snored at my feet. I told myself it was for Mira, a neighbor who insisted that writing things down would help the fog lift. But after the third week, the entries stopped being about what I’d done and started being about what I had not done.

On the twenty-third of July, while Ray was out buying feed for the goats, I let Nero into the yard. It was a heavy, still afternoon, the kind where the air feels thick as wet wool. As I bent to untangle his leash, a smell came at me—strong and wrong. It was the smell of burnt sugar, but cloying, almost meaty, like something left too long in a pan. I froze. The smell was everywhere, drifting from the direction of the old workshop at the back of the property, the one Ray never used anymore. I walked over, my boots crunching on the gravel, but the door was locked with a padlock I didn’t have a key for. I pressed my face to the window, but the glass was grimy, and I could see nothing but my own pale reflection. When I stepped back, the smell was gone, as if it had never been.

Ray came home with a bag of oats and a grin, which turned to a frown when I told him. He laughed it off, said it was probably the creosote from the fence posts. But that night, as I lay awake, I heard the sliding of something metallic in the workshop. I got up, went to the kitchen window, and saw a thin strip of light under the workshop door. There was no power out there; we’d had the electricity cut to it years ago. I didn’t sleep, but in the morning the light was gone, and the padlock felt luke warm, as if someone had just touched it.

In the first week of August, I started finding small, perfect piles of ash in the house. The first was on the bathroom sink, a neat heap about the size of an egg, grey and soft as dust. I cleaned it up with a tissue, but within hours there’d be another one—on the kitchen counter, on the back of the toilet lid, once even on the floor of the hallway, right in the middle of the runner. Ray said it was Nero shedding, but Nero’s fur was brown and white, not grey. I didn’t tell him that the ash smelled faintly of burnt paper, like the charred remains of a letter you’d thrown into a fire but hadn’t wanted to burn.

On the twelfth, I was boiling potatoes for supper when the smell returned—burnt, acrid, that same sweet-foul odor. I turned off the stove, but the smell only grew. It was coming from the cupboard under the stairs, a closet we never opened because it was stuffed with Ray’s old fishing gear and boxes of photographs. I opened the door, and a wave of heat hit me, and there, on the top shelf, sat a cast-iron pan I didn’t recognize. It was black with soot, and in the bottom was a ring of dried, brown residue that looked like someone had tried to cook something and let it char to nothing. My hands shook as I took it out. The pan was light, too light, as if it were hollow. When I turned it over, there was a date scratched into the handle: 6-6-2012.

That was the day my daughter, Lila, died. She hadn’t died in this house—she’d been in the city, in a car crash, the news delivered by a policeman who smelled of stale coffee. But the date was there, sharp and deliberate. I dropped the pan, and it shattered like a dry bone, and fragments scattered across the linoleum. I swept them up, but the next morning, a new pile of ash was on the kitchen table, and in its center was a small, brown button—the kind from the cardigan Lila used to wear. I hadn’t seen that cardigan in a year. It had been buried with her.

Ray began to notice the ash and the smells, but he attributed it to our old stove, which he’d been meaning to replace. I let him believe that. I started sleeping with Nero in the hallway, outside Lila’s old room, which we had kept as a shrine of sorts, with her graduation photo and a baby shoe. On the twentieth, I found the ashes arranged in a circle on the floor of that room, and in the center, a single, unburned matchstick. I knelt, and I could hear a faint, sizzling sound, like water hitting a hot griddle, but there was no water anywhere. I called out, ‘Lila?’ The sound stopped, and the room went cold.

On the first of September, Ray went to town for the monthly supplies, and I was alone with Nero. At dusk, I saw a figure standing by the workshop—a woman in a grey dress, with her back to me. I knew her shape, the way her shoulders sloped, the way her hair fell, even though she’d had it cut short for the funeral. I walked toward her, my heart pounding, and as I got closer, she began to turn. But before I could see her face, the workshop door burst open and a gust of hot, ash-laden air hit me, and the woman vanished. Inside the workshop, instead of Ray’s old tools, I saw a kitchen—a stove, a table, a high chair. The stove was on, and on its top burner, a pot of something was boiling dry, sending up a column of white smoke. I turned off the burner, and as the smoke cleared, I saw a photograph on the table, of a young woman and a child, both smiling. The woman was Lila, but the child wasn’t her daughter, Mira’s granddaughter—that was a boy. This was a girl with dark hair, wearing a dress I didn’t recognize.

I ran back to the house, and in the kitchen, the temperature was blistering. A pot on the stove—my stove—was boiling, though I hadn’t lit it. I lifted the lid, and inside was a bubbling, brown sludge that smelled like burnt potatoes and spilled milk. I gagged and threw the pot into the sink. The sludge sizzled and ate a shallow hole into the enamel before it cooled to a hard, black crust. And then, from the backyard, Nero began to bark, desperate, and I ran out to find him pawing at a patch of earth near the old oak tree. The ground there had been turned, as if freshly dug, and in the wet soil was a footprint—small, child-sized, pointed toward the house.

That night, I wrote my final entry. I heard the kitchen faucet turn on by itself, and then off. I smelled baking bread, but with a hint of rot. I knew what I had to do, but I didn’t have the courage. I set the journal down on the table, and in the morning, Ray found it closed, with a single sheet of paper tucked inside. On it, in handwriting I didn’t recognize, were the words: ‘You never let me finish.’

Ray didn’t say anything when I showed him. He just paled and took the journal into the backyard, where he burned it in the old oil drum. I stood at the kitchen window, watching the pages curl and blacken, and for a moment—just a moment—I smelled burning chicken, and something else, something sweet, like a cake in the oven. And then it was gone, and the ash drifted up into the grey September sky, settling like a fine dust over the whole yard. I haven’t written in a journal since. But sometimes, when the wind is right, I can still hear the faint hiss of a stove that isn’t in our kitchen, and I know that her meal was never finished—and never will be.