Regarding April 21, 2022, the hardest day of my life.

I climb in the passenger seat of the rental car, parked outside the crematorium. My partner follows the GPS to a parking lot by the Mediterranean. I direct the AC vent to my face and do not feel it. I point at the pink flamingos in the shallows. He doesn’t see them. The air is briny, and the wind hits when I open the door.

I’m wearing a blazer, leopard shoes and my partner’s yellow t-shirt. I forgot all of mine in Canada.

Last time I was here, it was with my dad. We laughed at the tourist train. He gave it the finger. 

The strip between sea and étang smells and sounds exactly the same, bitter and dotted with gulls. The waves are rolling in, mechanical behind the dunes. I do not want to see the Mediterranean quite yet. We don’t speak on the walk to the Cathedral of Maguelone. Sand sticks to my shoe and my hair tangles on my cheeks.

At the crematorium, my dad has been introduced into the burning chamber in his pine coffin. The cheapest they had. He had wanted cardboard; my siblings refused. As I walk on the steaming asphalt, his soft tissue begins to burn. 

There are plastic wrappers and water bottles by the path. The tourist train passes us. It’s empty, disarticulated. I give it the finger. 

We turn right onto the road to the Cathedral, surrounded by vineyards and étangs. Irises bloom on the side of the road. The Cathedral itself peeks out of a grove of trees. Walls thick, arches heavy. 

Inside, the air is cool. There are birds circling above, coming in and out of gaping holes in the walls. 

I put my hand on the stones. This wall feels immutable. 

I graze every divot in the stone with the pulp of my fingers, the texture of damp moss, the creases between blocks.

My dad’s bones are now getting calcined. Soft tissues gone. Only his gold tooth sits intact in the inferno.

I stand in the middle of the nave and look up at a beam of light coming from the only window above the altar. I would feel something if I believed in God. Yet all I see is fire.

Outside, there are two peacocks in a tree. One is white. They scream. I see their beauty. I dare them to keep screaming.

After a walk through the grove, we head back towards the beach. It is rocky here. Naked bodies, old and young. This strand is nudist.

I remove my blazer and hold it between my torso and my arm. It is the first time this year my skin has seen the sun. The light is much too bright, and I want to punch it into dim. I find a rock I like and take it.

My dad is nothing but fragments of bone. The fire cools. Someone whose job it is to do this all day sweeps him out, takes out the gold tooth and places him into a cremulator. I always hated that tooth. He comes out as a gritty powder. I rinse the rock in the waves and wet my shoe. The powder goes into a plastic bag, the plastic bag into a green cardboard cylinder.

My head buzzes. I can feel the sand in my socks. I want to rip them out and keep walking barefoot. And I do. Grit and wet beneath my soles.

At the car, I open the door to a furnace. I sit and brush sand off my skin, put my socks back on, and my leopard shoes.

At the crematorium, my brother comes out with a red velvet bag. Too small. 

I still feel the sand between my toes.