I sprinkle cremains from my mother’s urn into a Siamese blunt glazed with honey. The flame from my fluorescent lighter somersaults with inertia of shooting stars. Granddaddy Purple and calcium phosphate burning my lungs, birthday balloons in my stomach, animal clouds kissing shrinking horizons. I inhale my mother’s bone dust, her soul marinating in my esophagus. Heaven is smoking your mother’s cremains.

"Smells good," says a passerby.

"Hit this," I say.

"Thanks."

Mom sprained her thumb spanking our faces in the Costco Food Court line. Me and my conjoined sister. My ear bleeding into our Chicken Bake. Teary mucus festooning from four crimson nostrils like fish hooks.

"Hit this," I say to a surfer.

My mother punched our buttocks simultaneously while watching Wheel of Fortune. Mom gave us titty-twisters every night for Hanukkah. We were connected at the torso and shared a pelvis and reproductive system.

"Catch anything?"

"Pink polluted salmon."

Mom cooked earthworms and told us they were Sichuan spicy noodles. Dad abandoned us in the eyewall of Hurricane Andrew. He cartwheeled into a labyrinth of horizontal torrents and vanished. We squirmed like an octopus through blinding gusts. My sister belly-flopped from the George Washington Bridge on our fourteenth birthday. I collapsed in the Taco Bell parking lot as her bones shattered like a tortilla shell.

"Can I hit that?"

My sister never should have been alone. God connected us, but surgeons dissected stardust. The fisherman puffs the canoeing blunt.

“Granddaddy Purple,” I say.

Gooey honey coagulates in golden clumps between swollen knuckles.

"Tastes like heaven," says the fisherman. “Memories roast like marshmallows.”

He casts his line into the ocean and waves at sunburned children floating on rubber crocodiles with drunken fathers rubbing cratered skulls. Better to have a drunk dad than a father who vanishes into a calamitous hurricane. The moon escapes from a cumulus zoo. I ooze closer to the ocean, take another hit.

"Whopper of a catch."

The fisherman is clutching a two-headed trout wrapped in a Trojan Bareskin Studded Condom. McDonald’s spankings were ruthless. Our muddled body smacked like a charbroiled patty at Burger King on our ninth birthday. Mom dances naked in my esophagus like she did in the living room, guzzling gin. She melts on my tongue like fever dreams. Her suicide is a masterpiece, the perfect separation surgery. No note, no will, no possessions—other than her body—blunt ashes floating into the murky ocean.

"Hit this."

Granddaddy Purple and calcium phosphate camouflages an orbit of turquoise pompoms. They’re barely teenagers, but Mom got us high on Siamese blunts of Bob Saget OG on our eleventh birthday. My sister lost our virginity when we turned twelve. We pierced our belly button at age thirteen with a shish kabob skewer.

"Tastes weird."

I curl my pinkie into Mom’s urn. I fondle cremains as if stirring a gin and tonic.

“Weird is good.”

“Nice navel ring.”

I swallow fistfuls of Mom as a pelican swoops toward my stomach. I’m riding a mother ship to Heaven pulling down my rocket ship underpants and wrestling the pelican.

"I’m sorry, Mom. I love you."

Mom didn’t hate us. She spanked us to feel alive.

"Hit this," I say to a toddler.

Her mother scowls at me like a lunatic. I remember that look.

"Spank me please," I say.

“What a weird request from a stranger,” she says.

“Please,” I say. “I lost my mother.”

She braces me calmly over her thigh. Tears shoot from my eyes like stars.

Matthew Dexter lives in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He survives on warm sunshine, cold beer, and shrimp tacos. Matthew's fiction has been published in hundreds of literary journals. He is the author of the novel The Ritalin Orgy and the story collection Slumber Party Suicide Pact. He can be found at matthewdexter.com.