fwriction

Today’s Story of the Day comes from Sam Lipsyte, whose new novel, The Ask, is kicking some literary ass right now. This is a few years old, but well worth the read:

“I drove to my buddy Cudahy’s grave. Cudahy didn’t have a grave. I parked and walked the pathways of the tony boneyard where somewhere a sandwich-sized wedge of granite bore his name. We’d cindered him, after all, old Cudahy, poured him into an urn, the so-called Florentine — where were his ashes now? In mini-storage? On a hock shop shelf? Beside the chipped china and warped seventy-eights at some old biddy’s going-out-of-subsistence yard sale? — but an anonymous donor had sprung for a marker, a simple stone in this spare outer lawn, this necropolitan burb, set-aside for the absentee dead.”