Turns out that some of my assumptions about cremation were quite off. i always thought that after cremation, all that would be left was a pile of ashes which they would hand to you in an urn, all ready for the family to do whatever they wanted. in reality however, the body is not completely disintegrated and there will remain a few bone fragments. and these bone fragments will be contained and passed to the family in a standard toyogo box, the stackable kind that most people would use to store books or toys or other trivial posessions. what's more is that if the person was a full-grown adult, chances are that the bones will not fit into your average urn. when that happens, a friendly staff member would take a wooden mallet and proceed to crush the bones, which have been rendered brittle through the cremation process, until they were more or less ground into powder, before pouring the ashes into the urn. all this is done in the presence of whoever is collecting the ashes, and there is no effort made by the staff to hide or even pretend to be ashamed of their detachment.
forgive me if my tone seems caustic, but as much as i try to be impartial and objective whenever i post stuff here, i have to admit that sometimes there will be snippets of bias that evade my greatest efforts to remain neutral. still, at the end of the day i dont hold it against the cremation people. it has to be difficult to stay human all the time when you dabble in such an emotionally trying industry as death. the job only requires something capable of storing cremated remains, something that can convert said remains into ashes, and something to pass the ashes to the recipients. the job doesnt require actual emotion on the part of the employee; in fact, emotion would be a liability to the employee in this case, as he would be more likely to choke on his own emotions. im quite sure that if the whole process could be automated then it would, because a robot could carry out the task with cold precision and clinical efficiency. but since the process cant be automated (at least not at our current state of technology), the logical alternative would be to make the employees as robot-like as possible.
amidst all the rumours, all the gossip, all the guesses, could there really be a genuine tale being written? i shall watch this play unfold through my tunnel vision and see if i've guessed the plot. and up till now i still dont know if the characters have broken the fourth wall.
