Maybe the strangest one yet

Okay, here’s a weird dream for you. Had this one this morning.

A Russian gymnast dies at the Olympics. She’s cremated, and for some reason, it’s up to me to get her ashes back to Russia. They’re heavier and bulkier than I expected, and I managed to knock them over in one of the upstairs bathrooms of my parents’ house. The ashes go everywhere. I have to get a Dust Buster to gather them all up… and a new one, so it’s clean inside!

On the trip I end up at this tiny restaurant in southwestern Ontario (somewhere in Cambridge, I think, for some reason). Two men are arguing at the table in the window, and the one with his back to the wall shoots the one with his back to the counter by the door. A lot of fighting, a lot of confusion for a few moments. The dead man and the murderer are taken away. With some reluctance, I take a seat in the dead man’s chair. The other people in the restaurant are shocked at my being willing to sit where a man was murdered, and some resent my presumption. But I sit there quietly, every second more and more certain I have every right to have done so.

I’m in a car, being driven along a country road westward somewhere up in the forests and farmlands of western York Region. The driver of the car is Jody (Jody is a friend of mine who died of cancer in June, 2004; we knew each other for ten years over the net but never actually met in person in life). We’re both anxious to see this over and done with. I have the box of the gymnast’s ashes in my lap, but suddenly I notice all the ashes have disappeared, probably blown away during the trip, and all we have left is a horrible skull, grey with ash and still kind of pink with its newness (are newly defleshed skulls pink?). It’s too terrible for either of us to look at for long. I’m worried the police will think we murdered her if we get stopped. What will the Russians say if we show up with just this, having lost all the rest? We start thinking about just burying the skull somewhere.

That’s about all I remember. A couple of points I’m sure tie in… I actually do have a small vial of Jody’s ashes; they were given to me by his roommates at his memorial service in Texas. Second, I also have a copy of the state-issued certificate declaring them human remains… Jody’s Uncle Jesse was pretty insistent that I would want to have that while transporting his ashes, especially across the border.