The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

15 Flames of Purgatory 2009

Lóa lent me her mobile phone yesterday while she went out to the 7-Eleven to buy me a lightbulb. I grabbed the chance to call the crematorium and get some information about the procedure. They tell me they cremate seven to ten bodies a day, each of which produces four to seven pounds of ash (depending on their weight, I presume), and the temperature of the furnace goes up to a thousand degrees Celsius. One probably needs to stay in it for an hour. ‘Or possibly an hour and a half, I would say,’ a young girl told me in a dreary tone. She seemed to be a whole lifetime away from ash and fire, despite the fact that she was standing there right in the centre of death’s smelter. I’d imagined it would take less than that, but I suppose I won’t be in any great hurry when the time comes. The girl seemed incredibly dim-witted.

‘I’d like to book an appointment with you for a cremation.’

‘Book an appointment?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right, okay… could I… have your name, please?’

‘Herbjörg María Björnsson.’

There was a slight rustling of papers.

‘Right, I can’t find it in our register. Have you sent in an application?’

‘Yes; no, I’m making a booking for me, for myself.’

‘For yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘But… you see… we need to get the form first, you understand.’

‘And how do I do that?’

‘You can just fill it in online and send it to us, but we won’t actually process it until… well, yes.’

‘Until what?’

‘Yes, well, we don’t actually, you know… until people are, you know, deceased, you see.’

‘Yes, yes, I’ll be dead when the time comes, you can be sure of that.’

‘Yes? Erm…’

‘Yes, if the worst comes to the worst I’ll come over and you can just shove me into the furnace alive.’

‘Alive? No-o, that’s… not allowed, you see.’

‘Right, well, I’ll try to come dead then, when do you have a slot?’

‘Yes, well, er… when would you like to…’

‘When would I like to die? I was thinking of dying before Christmas, during Advent, around mid-December.’

‘Yes, we have vacancies… Yes, it’s all blank, I think.’

‘Right, so can you book me a place?’

‘Er… yes, sure. When, then?’

‘Let’s say the fourteenth of December. What day of the week is that?’

‘Erm… that’s… that’s a Monday.’

‘Yes, that’s perfect, perfect way to start the week by having yourself cremated. What times do you have?’

‘Erm… the very first slot is free as it happens, nine o’clock. You can also come after lunch, you know.’

‘Yeah, I… I guess it would be safer to have it in the afternoon. Then I can take my time.’

‘To… to come here, you mean?’

‘No. I might have to slash my wrists and I’m not going to do that on a Sunday evening. I mean, the blood could take some time to flow out of me…’

‘Uh-huh… I’ll just write that down… but you…’

‘What?’

‘Are you absolutely… I mean… are you absolutely sure that you want…?’

‘Yes, yes, I just want the furnace to be really hot, I don’t want to be half-cooked. A thousand degrees, you say?’

‘Yes, yes, don’t worry, we can heat it up well in advance before…’

‘Yes, and I go in headfirst, right?’

I prefer the incinerator to the grave, although I could easily afford a coffin and wreaths. Of course, the boys might be drawn to the idea of carrying their mother down the church steps, but I don’t really know whether I feel like letting them do that. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that they will even attend their mother’s funeral. They’re busy men, so they might not even listen to all the death announcements on the radio.

Yes, I’m determined to depart at Advent. I couldn’t stomach another Christmas stuck in this garage. We had such a lonely Christmas in here last year, the laptop and I, and a cold one, too, even though dear Dóra had some roast meat and gravy delivered to me. Actually, I’m surprised the council hasn’t thought of some way of recycling people like us who would like to donate their organic waste to the planet. They could grind us up for fertiliser to give the flowers, instead of killing them in our honour. But I probably wouldn’t be eligible, with all these toxins in my body. Yes. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of those thousand degrees. The flames of purgatory could hardly be any hotter and ought to remove some of the blemishes on my wretched soul, which I’ve been unable to erase myself.