I

The ash box was the cheapest kind you could buy at a funeral supply store. Plastic, grey, with a latch that did not quite close. Ray Kowalski found it in the back of an abandoned warehouse on the south side of Cleveland, tucked behind a stack of rotting pallets like something someone had tried very hard to forget.

He did not know whose ashes were inside. He did not care, not really. But he also could not just leave it there, in the dark and the damp, where rats and rain and time would reduce whatever was left to nothing at all.

So he picked it up and carried it home.

His home was a trailer at the edge of a mobile home park in a town that used to have a factory and now had nothing but a vacant lot and a sign that read SOMEBODY'S DREAM in peeling paint. The trailer had two rooms, a wood stove, a refrigerator that worked sometimes, and a couch with a tear in the armrest where Ray's dog used to chew. The dog was dead. Ray was not. That felt unfair sometimes.

Ray put the ash box on the kitchen table and sat down and drank a beer and tried not to think about it.

II

He heard the voice three nights later.

It was after midnight, the kind of hour when the trailer was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator and the wind against the metal walls. Ray was sitting at the table, drinking his second beer of the evening, staring at the ash box like it might tell him something if he just looked at it long enough.

Then he heard it: a woman's voice, faint and distant, like someone speaking from another room.

Why are you doing this?

Ray looked around. The trailer was empty except for him and the ash box and the two empty beer bottles on the table. He had been drinking for three hours. He knew what his voice sounded like when he talked to himself. This was not his voice.

Or maybe it was. Maybe it was just his brain doing what his brain had always done when the silence got too loud: filling it with noise.

"Doing what?" Ray said out loud, and his voice sounded stupid in the small space.

The voice did not come again. Ray drank his beer, finished it, opened another one, and went to bed.

In the morning, he went to the public library and asked the librarian if she could help him look up old newspaper articles about a woman whose ashes had been found in an abandoned warehouse on the south side of Cleveland.

The librarian, a woman named Doris who had seen everything a human being could see and was not impressed by any of it, looked at him over her glasses and said, "You want me to do your research for you, Ray?"

"Just help me find the right database," Ray said.

Doris helped him find the right database. Ray searched for three hours and found one article: a report from 2013 about a woman named Maggie who had died after an argument with her husband. The article said she had been found unconscious in her home and pronounced dead at the hospital. The article did not say whether the cause was blunt force trauma or a pre-existing condition or something else. It said her husband had moved away shortly after her death. It said no one had claimed her remains.

Ray printed the article, thanked Doris, and went home.

III

He bought a small coffin from a hardware store—the cheapest one they had, made of particle board and covered in vinyl that looked like wood if you did not look too closely. He drove it out to a patch of empty land on the edge of town, a place where the grass grew tall and nobody came, and he dug a hole with a shovel he had borrowed from the trailer park manager.

The hole was two feet deep and three feet long. Ray lowered the coffin into it, covered it with dirt, and patted the dirt flat with the back of the shovel.

"Rest in peace, Maggie," he said, and it sounded stupid even to him.

He drank a beer at the gravesite. Then he drove home, parked the trailer, and sat at his kitchen table and stared at the empty space where the ash box had been.

He felt nothing. Not sadness, not relief, not satisfaction. Just nothing. The vast, empty, crushing nothing that was the default setting of his life.

Dale came by a week later. Dale was Ray's friend, which is to say they had known each other for twenty years and still had not found anyone else to drink with. Dale looked at the empty space on the table and said, "Where's the ash box?"

"I buried it," Ray said.

"For real?"

"For real."

Dale was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You are a good man, Ray."

Ray looked at him. He had heard that before, from other people, in other contexts, and he had always known what it really meant: you did something that other people would not do, and now they feel better about themselves because they did not do it themselves.

"A good man," Ray repeated, and he felt the words like a joke he had heard too many times to find funny anymore.

"Yeah," Dale said. "You are."

Ray picked up his beer and took a long drink. "A good man is worth shit, Dale. You know that, right? A good man is worth exactly shit."

Dale did not know what to say to that. So he did not say anything. They drank beer in silence for an hour, and then Dale left, and Ray sat alone in his trailer and listened to the wind against the metal walls.

IV

Nothing changed.

Ray still drank. Ray still could not find work. Ray still woke up every morning and stared at the ceiling and tried to figure out why he bothered. Maggie did not come back. The ash box was in the ground, and the dirt was settling, and the grass was growing over the spot where he had buried it, and nobody was going to come and visit her grave and wonder who she was and why she had ended up in an abandoned warehouse.

Ray told the story at the bar sometimes, to anyone who would listen, which was not many people but was enough. He would say: I found a box of ashes. I buried them. A guy told me I was a good man.

And they would say: You are a good man, Ray.

And Ray would drink his beer and say: A good man is worth shit.

And the bar would keep playing its terrible country music, and the bartender would keep wiping the same spot on the counter over and over, and the winter would keep coming, colder and longer and more indifferent than ever, and Ray would keep drinking, and waking up, and staring at the ceiling, and going back to the bar, and telling the story, and hearing the words, and feeling nothing.

That was all.