Cremation
By Lissa Staples
Connecticut is on the dizzy edge of spring. I leave my suitcase in the hallway and sit on the couch with my brother who is skeletal. Pain rings his brown eyes despite the oxycodone and he looks years older than when I saw him four months ago. His bathrobe hangs over bones with no muscle mass, wasted from the cancer that is eating him alive. His face, once round and fleshy, is gaunt, which I find unexpectedly handsome. As we talk, the colostomy bag slides onto the couch from under his bathrobe. The urine is pink with blood. He tucks it back and makes a sarcastic comment to cover his embarrassment but can’t look at me, and I wish he’d said nothing. He says, I am healing. He says, I have a lot of things to do, like cut up the oak that came down in a storm two summers ago for fire –. Just like that, he’s asleep. I see no sign of hope in his exhausted face, just a destination, and the silence in the house is crushing me. So, I take the familiar route out the back door and into sunshine, past the flowerbed vibrant with yellow daffodils and purple crocus. Spring is practically bugling with songbirds. Winter hoar is buried under new grass that stretches over the long-toed feet of oak, birch and maple trees. Tiny fists of leaves bubble on deciduous fingertips ready to uncurl, to fluff and fill the aerial space between trunks. In the middle of this celebration lies the old oak I used to climb just to look west, pulled by an instinct I still don’t understand. Now the tree is silvered, riddled with insects, and it feels right to honor this old friend with cremation. My brother is now climbing his last tree but his feet are struggling to find safe purchase on the brittle boughs. As light as he is, they continue to break. He falls over and over, each time a little further. The earth waits for him and all I can do is be ready to honor his wishes with fire.
Lissa Staples (she/her) is a classical singer and emerging writer. She won Synkroniciti’s short story contest with “The Month of Drowning”, which was subsequently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has also appeared in Corvus Review, Heartwood Review, The Stickman Review and elsewhere. She lives in Colorado.
Artist Statement: As a classical singer, prose poetry is a very natural creative process to me. I think of this hybrid form as ‘through-composed’ music: continuous, non-sectional and free-flowing. By combining the lyricism, metaphor and figurative language of poetry with the linear quality of prose, the writing (and reading aloud) experience becomes musical to me.
Artwork Source: “Evanescence,” Vidya Murali
Artist Statement: Evanescence (Photo by iPhone-16; post processed). Sometimes, some visuals arrest the mind, affecting deeply in some indescribable manner. These onion skins in a net-bag, for a moment, seemed like wings desiring to be unbound. But the visual disappeared quickly, evanescing into nothingness. Photography gives power to capture and retain such accidental moments. Nothing lasts forever, even memories wilt, but that very impermanence teaches us to accept change as a natural part of life’s fragile and fleeting magic.
After a fulfilling life as Homemaker, Vidya Murali (She/Her) is enjoying the sunset years in pursuits that have always been her favorite pastime–arts and crafts. She likes to learn new techniques and keep herself informed of technologies that can aid her creative impulses. Reading and Travel are her other passions. She lives in Bangalore, India, and shares some of her work on Instagram: @vm.yosee
The Turning Leaf Journal 