When your friend drunkenly tells you that they want you to smoke their ashes when they die, it doesn’t really register in your mind as one of those things you’re supposed to take seriously.
Now… imagine my surprise when I got a call from a Mr. Shaw at 6pm on a Thursday explaining to me that my good buddy Jack Turner had overdosed on Hot Cheetos the night before and he had it explicitly written in his will that I would be receiving his charred remains.
When I had heard news of Jack’s death, of course, I was shocked. But not really surprised. He had been a stupidly heavy marijuana user and I’m sure the stage IV terminal lung cancer didn’t help him much either.
Immediately after the lawyer gave the details to me in layman’s terms, I hung up the phone and group-texted my friends Ben, Tucker, and Sarah. In less than an hour, the four of us were waiting somberly outside of Pearly Gate Funeral Home & Crematorium waiting on a mortician to retrieve our boy’s urn. All four of us made the promise, so that’s just how it had to be.
The drive to the forest was quiet. The walk to the campsite was silent. There wasn’t really much to say.
We had been grieving for months before this, and it seemed like none of us had any steam left in us to keep it going. We were tired of it. Not done, just… tired. So far it had been left unspoken, but we all knew what we had to do to really conclude and honor Jack’s memory.
Sarah was the first to speak. She buried her fingers into some excess fabric on her Hello Kitty fuzzies, obviously cold from being underdressed and attempting to give herself some heat. We were all cold. All of us were in our jammies except Tucker, who was the only one of us with any real obligations but who had also immediately clocked out of his convenience store shift for our emergency funeral.
“So he’s really gone, huh?” she broke. Her voice sounded shaky.
Silence.
I don’t know what everybody else was doing, but I was staring into the campfire. I had heard her, but I wasn’t really present, you know? It felt kind of weird being at Jack’s favorite smoke spot without Jack.
“Can I… can I see him?” Ben asked. After a few seconds of trying to get myself to focus into reality, I loosened my suction-gripped fingers from the urn and gently handed it to the left of me.
Ben opened the urn. A cartoony pop! sounded as he separated the lid from the body. I thought about nervously reacting with a chuckle, but I couldn’t muster it up and ended up only doing it in my head.
“So… that’s him.”
The urn started being passed around in a circle around the fire. When Tucker got it, he said
“Fuck, man.”
When Sarah got it, she didn’t say anything.
When it came back around to me and I got a chance to look at the black sand in the vase, my throat unconstricted itself so that I could tell everyone that I could tell it was really him in there because I could see his black cancer lungs. Everybody laughed at that. I think Jack would have laughed too, so I felt a little better.
It got quiet again.
“So…” Tucker started, “Are we really doing this. I mean, what if we get sick or some shit?”
Tucker was probably the smartest one out of all of us. Before even hearing the rest of his piece, I opened my mouth to side with him. I loved Jack and all, but the thought of inhaling his insides was not feeling appetizing to me. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get anything out before Ben started preaching from his own side.
“We gotta do it. We promised,” he asserted. “What’s a man without his word? Not shit. C’mon, guys.”
Ben had always been a little too daring. Lacking inhibition completely at some points.
“Well, I’m not a man, but I agree with Ben. We told him we were going to smoke him up, so we have to do it,” Sarah added, “I mean think about all the stuff he did for us—“
I thought about it.
“and he died from—from…”
“The munchies,” I chipped in.
“He died from the munchies. He was high when he died, which means he was probably thinking about smoking, and he—“ she sniffled dramatically, “he was probably thinking about us. His ghost is probably here right now standing beside us and wondering what we’re going to do here because he died while he was smoking and ghosts are probably how they are in the Sims.”
Sarah was already sort of high. I could tell for sure now. She was just blabbering on and on.
“He’s probably all gray and stuff, just hovering… like… Ooh. I have goosebumps. Ee—“
I guess all three of us got tired of her at the same time because we all stopped her talking with a variation of “Ok, let’s do it,” almost simultaneously. And nobody else needed to know, but all the ghost talk about my recently dead buddy was starting to creep me out in the middle of these dead woods, and I started feeling like I needed something to calm me down.
The four of us rolled joints in our own flavor of paper—hemp, pulp, straw, and a dollar bill. Sarah and I filled ours normally, but Tucker underdid his, and Ben stuffed in so much of Jack that he could barely get his joint to hold closed.
“You guys ready?”
We all looked around at each other expectedly. We all looked ready. All of us prepped our joints between our fingers and waited until we were all settled again.
“To Jack,” Ben smiled, lifting his hand up.
We mimicked him. “To Jack,” we synchronized. The four of us bent down close to the campfire and lit up. I put my cigarette to my mouth and breathed in, slow and steady. If I was going to inhale my friend’s intestines and stuff, I was going to make it worth it.
Surprisingly, nothing happened. I mean, something happened… but none of us coughed or choked or anything. Usually when we tried something new together, at least half of us had adverse effects right from the beginning. Nope. Not this time.
All that was weird this time was the contrasting sweet/sour aftertaste thing going on. The taste was strong, but nothing like my usual piney flavored Dutch. I hated to think it, but I was finding my dead friend’s remains almost… pleasant. Weird, but pleasant. Like three course dinner chewing gum or something.
We all swiveled our heads around to gauge eachother’s reactions. None of us seemed particularly bothered or looked like we wanted to stop, so we kept going.
With the second hit, the effects of smoking human ashes started to become more obvious. It hadn’t even been a full minute since the last one, but the drug was already starting to take full effect. By the time I had breathed out the next wave of smoke, my shoulders had slumped down, my heart rate had slowed, and I couldn’t even blink without forcing myself to. Not my typical kind of high, but I had felt a similar high before when I tried a strain different than my usual, so it didn’t really ring any alarm bells for me to be feeling a similar variation of that.
Funny thing, though. Since I was moving slow to the point of incapacitation, I started to notice that everytime I took a puff the ground shook a little bit. I guess Ben started to notice something too, because I heard him trying his darndest to vaporize every molecule of his Jack. The ground ferociously bumped up and down and side to side underneath us like a Jet Rider machine at Chuck E. Cheese.
It was discombobulating as HELL. Tucker groaned. I groaned too. It was starting to become annoying. Totally killing the vibe.
“Stap it Behn,” I muttered. I tried to be assertive, but it came out weak in my tipsy-like stupor.
Ben reached his hand out and pointed in Sarah’s direction.
She shrugged defensively and narrowed her eyes at him. “Hwhat?” she knotted.
“Not you,” he giggled, lifting his finger higher above her head, “Him.”
As quickly as I could in my stuporous state, I turned to my side to see what he was talking about. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t anybody around Sarah. The guys were to the left and she was alone to the right.
My concern was wrong.
“What… the fuck… is that?” Sarah bumbled, looking up.
It was a little hard to get my eyes to focus, but from what I could make out, there was some sort of giraffe-sized smoke golem hovering idly behind my friend. At least 20 feet high, this thing was a BEAST. An amalgamation of tar and shade with facial features that were not only distinct, but impossibly similar to Ben’s. It was like a fucking giant made of vapor or something.
Looking back on it, this should have been the first sign of danger. But we were just too goddamned high to perceive it as anything but the effects of a successful group buzz. We were too high to even be alarmed by the fact that the ASHES we were getting high off of was making us feel like we had been pounding down shots of pure tequila.
So, instead of any sort of survival instinct being slapped into any of us in those fatal seconds, we all just watched Sarah dismissively wave her hand and turn around.
“Nevermind,” she concluded, clumsily putting a finger on her temple, “I know exactly hwat it is—that’s Jack. I told you guys he hwas here.”
“If that’s Zack, then how did I make him?” Ben retorted.
“You didn’t make him. He’s been there the whole time.”
“Yes I did make him… and to prove it,” he put his joint up back to his lips, “I’m gonna make him again!”
Ben repeated the same thing he had done before. To his disappointment, all that happened afterwards was that the shadow monster got 5 feet taller. Sarah was satisfied anyway.
After checking out his handiwork, she changed her mind about him being a liar. “Oh, I guess you did make him…”
“Where’s Jack, then?” she pouted.
“Jack is dead. Really dead,” Tucker said. His eyes were dead too.
“That’s so fucked up,” she muttered. At first, it seemed like that was going to be the end of that, but then she started crying and her hands started shaking and she started doing rapid hits to calm herself down.
That’s how the second golem came about.
It was the same as the first one, but it had Sarah’s unmistakable Italian honker instead of Ben’s beady little eyes.
That monster didn’t do anything either. It just stood between Tucker and Sarah and stared into nothing while she unwittingly made it bigger and bigger. She hadn’t even noticed it had popped up until it was half the size of Ben’s—and even then, she just kept going.
I guess Tucker started to feel left out because he tried making his own too.
Not really sure why, but his looked like a snake. Big ass tapeworm rattlesnake or something. I would have made a golem of my own next if his hadn’t freaked me out so much.
Nobody liked Tucker’s golem. We all shifted away from it when we saw it. The male and female golem followed our movements. But the giant, silent figures mimicking us weirded us out a little bit too.
To break the tension between the seven of us, Sarah pulled out her phone, diddled on it for a second, then placed it down beside her on the log she was sitting at. A few moments later, mellow disco music started to swell from the phone’s speakers. Sarah always knew the perfect mood music no matter the situation.
After this, the band of us stood up and danced around the campfire like nobody was watching. Nobody was watching, really. It was just me, them, and our imaginary beasties.
This was the mood for 10 minutes. Dancing. Smoking. Laughing. Even the beasties got in on the action. They didn’t really seem to completely understand what rhythm was, but they swayed around us like loose leaves in the wind.
Everything changed when Tucker dropped his joint. Sylvester was just feelin’ mighty real and so was he. He was so engrossed with the music that he didn’t even bother to bend down and pick it back up. He was in his zone.
Tucker’s golem didn’t like that. At breakneck speed, the snap slithered to Tucker and chomped down on his arm.
Tucker screamed.
The rest of us froze. Almost in complete sync, our heads turned in his direction. We watched as the snake doubled down on his skin. We watched as a razor-sharp fang teased the edge of his thumb as the creature dragged Tucker’s hand nearer to the ground. We witnessed Tucker’s face shrivel, pained, as his body bent forward forcefully.
The snakeworm did not stop pulling Tucker until his hands touched the joint on the ground and his fingers wrapped around it. Only after that did the snake finally let go of his now oddly-bent wrist. Only after Tucker’s shaking, broken arm led the joint to his mouth for an inhale did the snake break its glare and leave Tucker’s side to return to its position exiled on the side of the campsite.
Because of my shock, my body was finally able to snap me out of my mindless huffing, and I finally gained enough common sense to put out my joint. In a second, I threw it at my feet and stomped the fire out with my birkins. No fucking way a smoke demon was going to bite the shit out of my arm.
Ben, Tucker, and Sarah all knew they didn’t have a choice in it though. At this point, they knew they had to keep smoking. So, we all sat back down and kept it going, slow as we were.
Whitney danced with somebody.
Anita got her bell rung.
Rose Royce got their car washed.
But my leg was fucking shaking. Not only was I suffering because I was having withdrawal symptoms at a record-breaking speed, but because I was scared. I was fucking terrified. There was only so much ash left in the blunts… especially Ben’s. Shit was about to hit the fan. I just knew it.
I was right.
Ben ran out of juice. He tried to savor it. He really tried. I saw so. But he couldn’t hold out.
Ben’s monster wasn’t breakneck. He sauntered slowly to Ben and picked him up upside down from his leg. He screamed.
Sarah screamed. Then she dropped her joint. The female golem came for her.
Tucker shimmied his body over to the cremation jar and reached to pick it up with his free hand. We made eye contact for a few seconds while he did it, which was unsettling for both of us. I don’t think either one of us could tell what was going on in the other’s head. When Tucker returned to his spot, he clenched the jar to his chest tightly, avoiding any more eye contact—with beast or human.
I would love to tell you that I fought the ash golems and got my friends back… but I didn’t. I didn’t even consider it. I mean, how could I?
One of them was getting shaken up like a can of orange juice.
The other was being stretched and examined mid-air by long, spindly, inhuman fingers.
The last was saving his life by making sure the other two couldn’t get a cut of the life-saving antidote.
I did not save my friends.
I ran.
I just fucking ran.
Maybe I’m a piece of shit for leaving my friends at the mercy of those things… but I just fucking ran. I couldn’t really do anything for them. I could barely do anything for myself. I barely even made it to the car. I stumbled the entire way. I was lucky I managed to even start the car and get it a couple of miles down the paralleling highway.
Not soon after, I lost control of my body and swerved into the median. Then, not soon after that, I lost consciousness.
But that was yesterday.
When I woke up this morning, I found myself bound to a hospital bed with nothing to entertain me but my phone and the only app that’ll load with service under the hospital’s heavy concrete.
Reddit.
And when I say I’m bound to the bed, I really mean it. I’ve got these fucking handcuffs on me. I’m basically glued to the railing. I’m not sure how the fuck I got here, but they left me with my phone… so it can’t be that bad, right?
I just hope my friends are ok…
I don’t want to think about it.
A word of advice…
No matter how much they beg or look at you with their puppy dog end-stage cancer eyes,
Do NOT smoke your friend’s ashes.
It doesn’t lead to anything good.