The Writer stands with his back to the sea, cheeks flushed by the fading sun. Ahead of him, Maja approaches from behind, tentative, yet her right arm reaches out to him, curling around his side. Only the swell of the waves holds any sound; if anyone spoke aloud now, the sound would be faint, muffled by the water beating against itself. The Writer is a tall figure, always clothed in that heavy, black felt-like coat with sleeves that billow. A sculpted silhouette, the Author—so he is called in the rooms where people speak of him. Maja slides her arm around him, the right arm, letting her hand settle on his far hip, higher than her own. She thinks he is enigmatic, and that thought amuses her for its banality. He is dangerous but not truly; his life proceeds with a kind of quiet aside from danger, and it is this quiet that makes him enigmatic, though the danger lies in not knowing what he might do or think—a danger more indirect than direct, thus less threatening, something she can live with. All the major turning points are behind him; he has already lived them. Now he exists in the afterlife of those events, more alive in what has happened than in what remains alive around him. If she were to join that life—his life—if she were to stay, to live here with him, she would have to accept that it might not become more eventful simply because she is part of it. She would have to allow herself to dissolve into the days that are his; she is not so foolish as to presume he would dissolve into hers. He is the one stepping into her days, here and now. Yes, the days are his, and at this moment, she is within them. She closes her eyes against the slipping sun; the heat drains from it as the light wanes, its rays pressing against her eyelids, and inside her lids she pictures herself approaching the urn she keeps one shelf beneath the living-room’s eye, the urn she has set apart, the urn she feels uneasy about admitting to this living room. When she boarded the plane to Genoa, it offered a relief to know she had locked the door behind her, and to know the urn sat behind that locked door, safe and unseen for as long as she remained away. When night cloaks the day, the urn stays there. When day shines on the night, the urn stays there. Locked in, buried, stowed away. No need to think about it at the conference, but she does anyway, a constant mental watermark. It remains there, hidden but not truly gone, a visible presence inside her eyelids, a tattoo she cannot wash away. On the second day, when the Writer steps up to the podium, righting the microphone, adjusting his stance, a gesture of rare confidence in which she now recognises something new—he has shed his black felt coat and stands there in a pale green shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, the Genoese light catching the hairs on his forearms—he speaks of the place where he works, of the beach near his house, and of what happened to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s body on that same beach, how his hands became unrecognisable after days in water and days under sand. Shelley’s name, spoken aloud, makes the urn recede in her mind but only for a moment; then the beach itself takes hold, an image inside her lids, vivid for the time being, and she imagines the shore as a real place, not merely a river of memory. The Writer does not know about the urn; he has not stepped into the living room that contains it, does not know about the ashes that must be held, and indeed knows nothing of anything Maja owns other than the items she has brought with her—scant possessions, a few books, including one by the author himself, which does not appear to impress him much, a fact that suits her fine; had he shown smugness, she might not have come here in the first place, to his house by the sea, with only a scant handful of belongings, and a glossy purple lip-balm like her own lips but deeper in hue. He regards those lips—now purple in the fading light of the sun—and notes their gloss. All of her possessions, those she has with her here, sit within his sight and reach. For example, he could lean out and touch that dark purple balm on her lips, yet he does not. Still, everything she has with her is present to him in his field of vision, within his reach. The other possessions she owns beyond what she brought are not known to him, and that—this ignorance—carries a certain power in her hands. One of those belongings makes her a criminal, a sense of crime simply by standing here on this shoreline, simply by meeting the writer’s gaze. The sun, now saffron and orange, crowns his face, and the idea that its warmth will vanish with the horizon is a thought she cannot quite escape. It lingers like a light, weightless chiffon veil, a fleeting thing that may dissolve as the sun dips, but the glow still feels like a form of hope—a strange, perhaps childish warmth that she knows is not love, but hope. The sun dwindles, the chiffon-like glow fading. In her country it is illegal to keep the ashes of a deceased person, and equally illegal to scatter them, unless the departed have left a recorded wish to scatter over open water, which a child will almost never have made, because what do children know of urns and funeral plans? Still, a required note would be the legal way to authorize scattering; without it, the act remains criminalized. Yet the act of not scattering—holding onto the ashes in a container—also complicates the law, as the absence of a note makes scattering illicit, while stowing the ashes is itself questionable. All this preoccupation with scattering seems absurdly cinematic to her, and she finds herself liking the word sprinkle more than scatter because it sounds lighter and almost playful, a thought she recognises as grotesque. It isn’t that she fetishises the ashes; it’s just that the idea of scattering—so purposeless and irreversible—feels wrong, and perhaps she was meant to arrange for burial immediately and never handle the ashes herself. Perhaps that is where she went wrong with her hands on the urn, the moment she left the crematorium with it pressed to her chest. The warden who handed her the urn—who watched her walk away with it pressed to her chest—allowed it to happen, perhaps. She wonders if she lied, perhaps misled herself, perhaps used her father’s address—the address where she remains officially registered since returning to the country of her childhood—even though she has not changed it since then, and perhaps she should. Maybe she did, in fact, use her father’s address to facilitate bringing the urn and lowering it into a garden, perhaps she filled out a form somewhere, on paper or online, and there was some minimum property requirement to meet, because in some jurisdictions you may only possess an urn on land of a certain size. If the garden burial is permitted, the urn must be made of a material that dissolves in water, such as paper; hers apparently is not. It is telling, she thinks, that burying a casket on private land is prohibited, while an urn may rest there, and that the act of stowing an urn is tied to property and wealth, a relic of feudal times. In this logic, lords may keep urns in their gardens; vassals cannot. A casket and an urn hold the same contents, the difference being the rate at which they degrade: a slow decay versus a lasting preservation. Is that the distinction—caskets in gardens seem sinister, urns more cheerful, the possibility of sprinkle rather than scatter? Have I misunderstood? Did she misfile a form or misread a checkbox, with a pen or a mouse, in the labyrinth of forms that exist in so many places? Were there other forms she did not understand? Or perhaps there was no formal written request at all, and her memory has not betrayed her. There are no authorities who verify whether the ashes were scattered at sea. Sprinkled. Scattered. After she left the crematorium, after holding the urn to her chest along the pebbled path down to the car park, after waiting for a taxi with the urn pressed to her chest, and after the long train ride with the urn in that large black canvas bag—the same bag she uses for weekend trips, the bag she carries with her now—she set it down in her apartment and sank to the floor opposite it. She sat there with the urn, unblinking, in front of her, and the greasy night descended as the streetlights turned the windows a murky green. She feared the moment she might move and send the urn toppling, setting its ashes free among her belongings like a vast dry cough, mingling with the dust of her shelves, the soot that gradually seeps through the cracked window facing the street, which now glowed green with the evening. A pang of guilt rose at the thought of the three things merging—the ashes, the dust, the soot—as if such mixing were somehow wrong, perhaps even monstrous. Yet she blinked and looked away, toward the street beyond the green glow. When she found enough breath to lift the urn, there was no longer any daylight; the Copenhagen sky outside her windows glowed a purplish black, an almost convex darkness. She reached toward the arc lamp, stretched out and rose as the light shone down on her, then placed the urn on the lowest bookshelf—the one with the widest gaps between shelves, the shelf that holds the heftiest volumes and dictionaries. After setting it down, a drift of dizziness washed over her, as if the wall itself might collapse in reaction to the urn’s new presence. It felt less like relief than an affront, given how many hours she had stood frozen in front of it, the urn. She longed to sleep in the living room that night, perhaps even to sleep in the same room as the urn for its first night there—a thought she found morbid, perhaps even a little grotesque.
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From Blue Sunset by Denise Rose Hansen. Used with permission of the publisher, Dorothy, a publishing project. Copyright © 2026 by Denise Rose Hansen.
