Read Letting You Go: A Short Story for Free Online

a contractor, so he researched how we could build everything ourselves, determined to make my dream come to life.
                  I snatched open one of the cabinets and took down a wine glass. His bottle of brandy still sat untouched in the fridge. I filled my glass to the brim. Allowing the fumes to settle, I studied his work in our cabinets. Just as I put the glass to my lips, the mail door clinked open and an apocalypse of envelopes slapped onto the wooden floor. I gently sat the glass down so nothing would spill, and found the unruly stack of letters below the front door. I scooped them up and shuffled through. Bills. Bills. Bills. Ads. Bills.
                  I skipped to the last envelope, which caught my attention as smaller and cream colored, compared to the white uniform standard of the rest. My name and address were written neatly in the middle. My heart dropped into my stomach when I saw the name in the upper left hand corner. Kenneth Allen .
                  Thoughts raced. It didn't make sense. Why would my husband be writing to me? Was it a prank? Did some insensitive, less than human being think it was funny to slip this through my mail drop? My husband would never write this. Because he's dead. Kenneth died in a fire three months ago. He crawled around a boutique store, searching for people trapped inside. The dark perplexing smoke disoriented him. He radioed in to the engine company he worked for. He asked them to tell me not to worry. That he was going to find a way out somehow. Then the roof collapsed on him.
                  When they found him, he was beyond recognition. They asked me if I wanted to see the body. I said no. I didn't want to remember him that way. I wanted to look back on the last time I saw him as walking out the door to the firehouse and kissing me goodbye.
                  “See you in a bit,” he had said.
                  I had him cremated, or at least what was left of him. It was hard, and remains one of the hardest things I've ever forced myself to do. I didn't stay for the entire funeral. I walked behind his empty casket, touched it with trembling hands, and knelt down to kiss it. His fire helmet rested on top, scarred and scuffed by the ash that took him. That's what finally got me. My girlfriend Kate put her arm around mine and supported me back to the car as they lowered it into the ground.
                  I requested his urn, knowing that I could never leave his ashes to chill in a stone cold cemetery. For months I kept it in a box, until the silence settled in the walls of our house, and I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't move on with an urn serving as a constant reminder that he was no longer with me. I already had his wedding ring for that, which I kept wrapped in a little American flag in my top drawer.
                  At the brink of insanity, I grabbed my keys and headed for the harbor. My conscience ate away at me. That was my husband in the vase. It would be his ashes I threw into the oldest harbor in the world, a sitting body of shit, human waste, and disease. I tried to talk myself through it, so I wouldn't feel so bad. “I'm sorry, Ken, I love you but you got to go. We'll never exist under this roof again.”
                  Not a lot of people have to deal with decisions like that, so the only moral example I had was my own. It didn't seem right to just dump him off like trash. Yet, he wouldn't have wanted it another way. He was a purebred, Yankee loving, “r” dropping, pizza eating, road raging, opinionated, pugnacious New Yorker. He loved this city.
                  When I got to the dock, I swung the urn over the railing. His ashes road the harbor wind toward the city. I had to remind myself ashes were ashes. They could never be puzzled together to make a person. I didn't cry like I thought I would. I felt strangely liberated. Like I'd