The Author is facing the sea, his cheeks orange from the lowering sun. There’s Maja, walking towards him, from behind, tentative, yet her right arm is reaching for him, reaching around him. No sound except the waves, they break against each other, if someone shouted now it would be hard to hear them. A tall mound, the Author is, tall and always in that black felt-like coat of his with the wide sleeves. Such a felt-wearing mound, the Author. Maja reaches her arm around him, the right arm, placing her hand on his far hip, it’s higher up than her hip. She thinks he is enigmatic, such a stupid thing to think, she thinks. He is dangerous but not really, he lives a fairly uneventful life, and it is this uneventfulness that makes him enigmatic, Maja thinks, but also the danger, the danger of not knowing, which is a danger more oblique than it is direct, and therefore less threatening, it is a danger she can live with. All the big events are behind him, he has lived it all, now he is alive with the living behind him, now he is more living with the having lived than he is alive with the living. If she would become part of that life, his, if she would stay here, live here, with him, she would have to accept that it would probably not become more eventful, his life, with her in it. She would have to let herself be absorbed into the days that are his, she is not so foolish as to think that he would be absorbed into hers, no, she is the one who is entering his days, here. Yes, the days are his and at the moment she is in them. She closes her eyes against the lowering sun, it’s losing heat with the lowering, she thinks, its rays are vague against her lids, and on their insides she sees herself walking towards the urn, the urn she has left behind, sort of, the urn that stands on the lowest shelf in her living room and which she feels so odd about being in her living room, so odd she started avoiding it, the living room. When she boarded the plane to Genoa it was a relief to know she had locked the door behind her, to know that the urn was there behind the locked door and would remain there for as long as she was away, safe and out of view. When night enshrouded the day, it would stand there. When day irradiated the night, it would stand there. Locked in, interred, stowed. Did not have to think about it there, the urn, at the conference, but she did anyway, could not stop thinking about it. It was out of view but not really. She was still seeing it, all the time, when she closed her eyes it was there on the insides of her lids, all through the morning sessions and all through her own talk, all through the afternoon sessions and all through the drinks reception it was there, like a tattoo on the insides of her lids. On the second day, when the Author went up on the podium, adjusted the microphone and placed his feet just so, and in a rare gesture, she now knows, he’d taken off his black felt-like coat, yes, he was standing there in a pale green shirt she has not seen since, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, the hairs on his arms catching the Genoese light through a generous window, and he told the congregation about where he wrote, yes, his place of work, told the congregation about the beach by his house, and about what had happened to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s body on that beach, about how his hands had been unrecognisable from days under water followed by more days under sand, Bysshe, the Author said, Bysshe, she stopped thinking about the urn and started thinking about the beach, on the insides of her lids now a beach, imagined, for now, but a real beach nonetheless. The Author does not know about the urn, has not set foot in the living room that holds it, does not know about the ashes needing to be held, does in fact not know about anything Maja owns besides the objects she has with her here, which is not many. She’s been here four days now, three days in his guestroom, one day in his bedroom, yes that bit is new, and she reckons he must have seen all the objects she has with her here, the objects she has brought into his house by the beach. Some books, including one of his, the having of which he doesn’t seem particularly impressed by, which is a good thing, she thinks, but then had he been smug about it she probably would not be here in the first place, with him here, in his house, by the beach, and with only a few items of clothing, a lip balm that is quite glossy and quite purple, it’s the colour of her lips, only more purple. He looks at those lips, hers, now in front of the lowering sun, and he sees that her lips are quite purple, quite glossy, she thinks. All her possessions, that she has with her, here, are somehow within his view, within his reach. For instance he could reach out and touch the quite glossy paste on her quite purple lips, but he does not. Even so, it is within his view, within his reach to do so. All her other possessions, the ones she has not brought with her, which is quite many, he knows nothing about, and that is a power, that is a power she holds, she thinks. One of those possessions makes her a criminal, she thinks, she has committed a crime and is still committing it now, just by standing here on the beach, just by looking at the Author’s face, she is committing it. So orange from the lowering sun, his face, a shame that the sun will take this tint with it when it dips behind the sea, she thinks, that it will not meld with his skin, not really, it lies upon his face like a weightless chiffon veil, and at the last moment the sun will reach out and pull that weightless chiffon veil with it, in one quick movement like a liquid down the drain. Yet this is the glow of hope, she thinks, which is a bit lame to think, she thinks, but still that is what she thinks, that orange glow which in her chest sometimes feels like love, warm and dense yet airy, but she knows it is not love, it is hope, actually. Almost gone now, the sun, that chiffon hope. Where she lives it is illegal to keep an urn with the ashes of a deceased, but it is also illegal to disperse them, to scatter the ashes somewhere, unless the deceased has written down the explicit wish for their ashes to be scattered over an open body of water, which is the only legal way to have your ashes scattered, and this will never be the case with a child, will it, that they’ve written down this wish in advance, no it won’t, because what do children know about urns and the scattering of ashes, for what do children plan ahead, what do children pay suit to when it comes to their obsequies, she thinks, yet that’s what you’re supposed to do, produce a note that states that precise wish, unless you want to commit the ongoing crime of keeping the ashes of a deceased. Of course the act of not scattering the ashes of the deceased both adds a layer to and suspends the crime, because the absence of a note criminalises the scattering, which Maja has not done, but also the stowing of the ashes, which in theory she should not be able to do in the first place, not without a note. All this focus on scattering is anyway quite a silly way of thinking about it, she thinks, the scattering of ashes over oceans mainly happens in soppy films, and maybe she likes to think the word sprinkle rather than scatter because it sounds more cheerful, more childish, which in itself is grotesque, she thinks, to want the more cheerful and childish word, it is really quite gruesome, and anyway it is not that she fetishises the ashes, no, nothing like that, she really isn’t driven by fetish, not when it comes to ashes in any case, it’s just that there’s something so irrevocable and so aimless about the scattering. Maybe she was meant to arrange for the burial of the urn immediately and never herself handle the ashes, maybe that was it, maybe that was where she went wrong, with her haptic engagement, when she took the urn in her arms and left the crematorium that was the moment, that was when she crossed the invisible threshold of her crime, but then the warden who was there when she was there, who handed her the urn, yes, who saw her leave with the urn against her chest, really allowed her to cross it, didn’t he, she thinks. Maybe she lied and forgot about the lie, maybe she lied in a fit of madness washed down with panic, maybe she used her father’s address, where she is officially registered, since returning to the country of her childhood she has not bothered changing it, she was registered there all through her time in her adopted country, and she is registered there still, at her father’s, she really ought to change it, she thinks, but now she can’t, no, now she really can’t change it, and maybe not changing it was a wilful absence of action, maybe she used her father’s address to request bringing the urn with her and lowering it into the garden, is it possible, did she fill out such a form, did she, she thinks, on paper or on some website, did that happen, there is a property size requirement for these things, yes there is, she thinks, and anyone looking her up from any state agency would think that she lived in a large house with a large garden, at her father’s, meeting the property size requirement. In the case of burying an urn in one’s garden, if your property is large enough, the urn must be made from a material that is soluble in water, such as paper, which her urn, if that is what it is, hers, is not. That’s interesting, isn’t it, she thinks, that you cannot bury a casket on private land, but you can bury an urn. And it’s interesting that the stowing of an urn is bound up with property, and a certain amount of it too, she thinks, that you are only entitled to have an urn on your property if you own a large house with a certain amount of surrounding land, making the possession of an urn a question of ownership, a question of wealth, a question of power, a remnant of feudalism. Lords can have urns stowed in their gardens, vassals can’t. A casket and an urn contain the same thing, the only difference being that the contents of the one will perish much quicker than the other, as though a slow ebb is more sinister than a quick one, as though water-solubility is not that sinister and the stubborn preservation of bones is much more so. Is that what it is, caskets in gardens are sinister and urns in gardens are less so? Are urns more cheerful, like sprinkle? Was it a misunderstanding? Did she tick a box on the left where she should have ticked a box on the right, on some form or other, with a pen or a mouse click, there were so many forms, there really were, she thinks, some she understood the meaning of, some she understood the headings of, others she didn’t, not really. Or maybe she has not made any formal request in writing, maybe her memory is in fact sound. There are no authorities in place to check whether the ashes were scattered over the sea. Sprinkled. Scattered. After her trip to the crematorium, after holding the urn to her chest on the gravel path leading down the slope to the car park, after waiting for a taxi like that, with the urn to her chest, after standing there in the swelling fog like a blanched-out image of a woman in a car park, like a woman holding a small child to her chest maybe, and after the three-hour train ride with the urn in the big black canvas bag, the bag that she uses for weekend trips, the bag she has with her here, she set it down on the floor of her flat, the urn, and she set herself down on the floor across from it. Yes, she sat in her living room and the urn sat there too, out of the bag, which she’d stowed away. She looked at the urn, out of the bag, and she didn’t blink. When the greasy night washed over her, over the urn, and the streetlights turned the windows green, she was afraid of somehow knocking over the urn if she moved, if she so much as flinched, though they were metres apart, the urn and her. She saw herself standing up and losing foothold, tripping, tumbling down, pulling the bookshelves down with her, hitting the urn with a limb or a falling object and having all the objects from the bookshelf mix with the contents of the urn, and the contents of the urn dispersing over all her belongings like a huge dry cough, blending with the dust of her books and the soot that seeped slowly but surely in through the cracky windows facing the street, the windows that were now green with evening. She felt guilt then at the thought of the three blending, the ashes and the dust and the soot, as if something was wrong with that, as if something was unnatural about that, which she felt it kind of was, still she felt guilt at the abhorrence she felt about the blending. Finally she blinked away. She looked away, at the green windows, towards the streetlight she could not see but knew was right there, just off to the side of the window. When she gathered enough strength, which was all her tired strength, to pick it up from the floor, the urn, there was a complete absence of daylight, the sky over Copenhagen a gleam of purplish black through her windows, no longer green, not anymore, just that purplish black gleam, an almost convex presence of purplish black, and she reached across the floor to turn on the arc lamp, yes, she stretched long, and though huddled she rose by the lamp’s yellow glare, slowly, and carefully she picked up the urn and placed it on the lowest bookshelf that had the biggest interval between shelves, it held the largest books and the bulky dictionaries. When she’d done it, set it down and let go, she felt faint, like she would fall over, because it was as though the whole wall should’ve come down but it didn’t, which was less a relief than an affront, given the hours she’d spent frozen before it, the urn. She wanted to sleep in the living room that night, perhaps to sleep in the same room as the urn for its first night in her flat, which was silly, she thinks, and also a little gruesome.
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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.
