Bestiary

Ash

57 Ash “There’s a moth trapped inside the fire,” my daughter says, but I explain, “No, it’s an ash.” She asks,“Like Paba?” A month before, we had transported my father’s ashes on a plane to Oklahoma. When we boarded, Airport Security insisted on viewing my father’s remains inside the urn. After they pried the lid, the crack kept fissuring. The day before my father died, a tree surgeon hacked down the ash which towered tall above our house. Struck by lightning, the tree had split in two, about to strike the roof. My father, cut down by disease, could no longer swallow or speak, yet he wanted to sit upright in his cane-back chair. I knelt on the oak floor, holding his gnarled hands. We shuddered to hear the buzz saw 58 chop down the branches. Early June. Outside my father’s house, the wood shavings hovered in air like moths. ...