A Short Story About Viral Remains. Sorry in advance.
Watch the Story Ape Podghast Video here. Warning has flashing lights and glitches and is awful.
Act I: Mum
The beach was the color of wet ash, empty except for the gulls. The air tasted like rusted pipe and wet cloth. He wasn’t out here trying to heal, he just felt compelled to sit near entropy. He was halfway between the jetty and a rotting lifeguard stand when he saw the bottle. A long, green bottle. Murky glass, like old 7-Up. Corked. Paper inside, curled like a dead spider.
He thought:
ok, based on shape & vibe alone this is either a potion or a haunted treasure map. if it’s a love letter i will consume it. if it’s poison i will also consume it. either way. i Win.
He squatted, stared at it a moment. Looked around. The bottle was heavier than expected. Something swirled inside—gray, granular, soft. A note, curled and water-blurred, pressed against the inner glass. He pried the cork loose with his keys. The smell was dry. Bitter. Like fireplace dust mixed with a hint of cinnamon. Probably psychosomatic. The note was handwritten in blue ink, the letters ballooned and lopsided.
The note read:
“This is my mum. She’s traveling the world. Please throw her back. Ellie. Whitby, UK”
He stared at that word: mum. Rolled it around in his skull like a marble. Then he started laughing. Short and stupid. One of those barks that comes up uninvited.
alright. some kind of beach grief art. not sure if it’s a prank. or a eulogy. what’s the plan here? am i supposed to chuck her into the ocean like a waterlogged grenade of sentiment? am i part of the ceremony now?
He carefully returned the note to the bottle and put the cork back in, then tucked the bottle under his arm and said aloud:
“Well… guess I’m your travel agent now, Ma. You’re in good hands.”
Back home, he placed the bottle there like an awkward award next to a stack of unpaid bills and an anime figurine with one broken arm. He opened a tallboy of malt liquor. He stared at her.
welcome to your new room. it’s small but full of character. you are safe here unless i do something monumentally stupid. like what i’m about to do in 5 seconds.
He unscrewed the cork. Tipped a bit of her out onto a napkin. Sniffed. Earthy. Musty. Notes of barbecue. Not terrible. He sprinkled her in rolling paper with some other stuff and lit it like a normal joint. He took one drag and immediately coughed so hard his respiratory system felt like it had been in an abusive relationship with a cheese grater.
“Jesus Christ, Ma.”
He talked to her while microwaving frozen burritos. He named her Ashley. Played music for her—mostly old Soul Coughing tracks and one Mahler symphony he found on YouTube titled “Best of Sad Classical.” When he shit, he brought her into the bathroom with him, set the bottle on the sink and said,
“Sorry in advance.”
He looked at her, slumped slightly now on the table.
“You ever been to Denny’s?”
He ordered coffee and over-medium eggs. Slipped a pinch of her into the pepper shaker while the waitress was busy swatting away weak harassment. Captioned it in his head: “Ma tastes good on eggs.” Giggled to himself. He was the only one laughing.
this is fine. this is part of the healing process. i am not insane. i am just doing The Work that no one else has the courage to do. she is probably proud. if not. that’s on her. i’m not gonna internalize that.
He sprinkled some into the cat litter box. Watched his cat paw at the remains of a stranger’s mother before squatting and shitting on them.
“Still better than Florida, I bet.”
Act II: The Message
The bottle sat on the desk next to a burnt-out Glade plug-in and a stack of Final Notice envelopes. He talked to her anyway. Out of habit. Out of guilt. Maybe out of love. He wasn’t ready to unpack that.
“You okay in there, Ashley?”
Nothing.
“I can microwave you. Just for, like, a second. Wake the particles up.”
Still nothing.
He sat on the floor, legs splayed, chewing a baby aspirin for no reason. The ash had gotten under his fingernails. Into his lungs. He hadn’t showered since the Denny’s incident. He’d begun wondering what she looked like. Not out of respect. Just morbid curiosity.
“You got cheekbones? Were you a fun mom or a ‘church mom’?”
He opened Google. Just typed the note in, verbatim: This is my mum. She’s traveling the world. Please throw her back. Ellie. Whitby, UK
He sat up. Phone battery at 9%. Perfect.
BAM.
There it was.
Top result: British News Syndicate. Headline: “Ashes Sent to Sea to Travel the World: Daughter’s Emotional Tribute Goes Viral”
NEW YORK POST
PEOPLE
HOLA
All these big news stories had jumped on the bottled cremains bandwagon. It went back to a Reddit post with over 100k upvotes and a cloying amount of positivity and heartfelt grief tourism.
she’s got BBC-level backstory.
i’ve been seasoning food with a trending eulogy.
He clicked deeper into the news archive. Local paper. Faded banner.
“Northport Mother’s Ashes Found Again After Sea Tribute Goes Viral.”
The article started with the familiar stuff—
“A bottle containing the ashes of local mother Suzy Capper washed ashore near Scarborough Harbour for a second time, months after her daughter launched it from the Yorkshire Coast.”
But then it changed. It got personal. She had four kids. Lost her legs during complications with her youngest. Spent her final years in a wheelchair. Husband split. She’d never been abroad. Never even flown. But she kept a scrapbook of destinations she’d cut out of magazines. Joked with the kids about seeing the pyramids “in the next life.” She died in her mid-40s. Daughter’s quote, etc.
He read some of the comments:
“Wholesome AF. She’s probably watching over you.”
you know what happens when you put cremains in the ocean?
they get eaten by a fish who gets eaten by another fish who ends up in a can labeled “chunk light tuna” at a gas station in Kentucky.
He looked up at the sodden sky outside his apartment, which could just have easily been the sea; gray and disinterested. The kind of colorless entity that didn’t give a single soggy fuck about your “emotional journey.”
and yet here we are.
me, the unwilling protagonist of someone else’s grief cosplay.
carrying a goddamn bottle of mom-dust that’s probably already been in three reels set to Sigur Rós.
He sighed. He wrote the daughter.
Subject: “URGENT (re: your MOM)”
hi.i have come into possession of your mother.
it was not on purpose. i was not out “shopping for a mom.” i found her in the ocean.for legal purposes, i did NOT ingest her. at least not entirely. and even if i did, that’s between me and her. in my defense, she looked smokable.
she has traveled. yes. Denny’s. the garbage zone behind Arby’s. i made a short film called “Mother Enters Litter Box”.
she whispered to me last night. said “the ocean has no memory.” i whispered back “neither does the state of Iowa.” it felt like a good exchange.
anyway just letting you know she’s safe.
sorry if this upsets anyone but technically you’re the one who started it by putting her in the sea.
Next morning: message gone. Blocked. Vaporized. He posted a screenshot with the caption:
“no one wants to hear about real shit anymore”
0 likes. 1 reply:
“Seek help.”
Act III: Guilt
He kept thinking about the article. He’d seen the photo now. He’d seen her eyes, heard her story. She’d been a mother of four with no legs.
okay. ok. this is…
no this is fine.
i just need to process the fact that the BBC has weighed in on the thing i vaped.
this woman’s journey is a SEO-compatible Disney+ grief quest and i am the cigarette burn on the film reel.
He closed the laptop. He sat with it. And then he whispered to the bottle:
“You made it. You went viral. Are you happy now?”
He kept scrolling and scrolling down that original Reddit post. So many comments to read:
“There would seem to be a risk – see bottle, pick up, oh a note, how cool, open bottle, turn up side down, shake bottle, get note, unroll, read, look down at beach… bugger.”
“lol I was thinking the same thing!”
“vigorously shakes the Mum off my hands”
He stared at that last one for a long time. It began to vibrate in his skull like a cursed mantra. He kept scrolling. A new commenter chimed in. And the replies were just soothing syrup:
“That’s very wholesome.”
“So sorry for your loss.”
“It helps to see the world through her eyes sometimes.”
He looked at his reflection in the dark screen of his laptop.
“Does anyone see through my eyes?”
Silence. The bottle sat on the desk like an old battery, drained of meaning but still toxic. He closed the laptop.
The next morning, a seagull was staring at him through the bathroom window. He panicked, slipping on his own sock. That’s when he snapped. Walked to the back alley behind Carl’s Jr. Held the bottle one last time.
“You sure?”
She didn’t answer.
“Fine.”
He dropped her in the dumpster. It made a soft clink. Like the world saying “meh.”
The regret came on slow but strong. A few days later found him clawing through the trash, muttering her name, repeating it again and again:
“RIP Ashley, RIP Ashley”
But the truck had come. The truck had gone. The deed was done, the guilt was real.
And so began his pilgrimage to the landfill. To find her. To apologize.
Act IV: Garbage Messiah
The front gate guard asked him,
“You dumpin’ or pickin’?”
He stared long into the man’s mirrored sunglasses and whispered:
“I’m here to apologize to a woman I disrespected in a culinary setting.”
They let him in anyway. America.
It smelled like every bad decision he’d ever made. Wet plastic. Rot-milk. Axe body spray from 2009. Something illegal and herbal. He wandered. Looking for the bottle. Looking for absolution. Instead, he found Duane.
Duane wore orange Crocs, a fluorescent vest, and the look of a man who had seen the inside of a mummified raccoon more than once that day already.
“You with the city?” Duane asked.
He shrugged.
“I’m with the BBC and People magazine.”
Duane blinked.
“You look like shit.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I think I got haunted by a mom I smoked.”
Duane nodded. Slowly. Like he’d seen at least five of that kind of guy this week.
He started cleaning up. But also—he started constructing a shrine. He whispered to it. Duane never asked. He started showing up every day. Duane eventually handed him a vest.
“You touch a worn-out Fleshlight, it’s on you.”
Sometimes they’d eat lunch together. Sitting on lawn chairs in the shade of a collapsed trampoline. Duane handed him a pork rind once and said:
“My wife left me for a guy who sells fake autographs on Etsy. That was in ’08. Now I just pick up other people’s garbage and keep my eyes out for treasure.” Duane had a load of hard-drives he’d collected since his wife left, each a dull, heavy rectangle of forgotten data, its own genesis block. He’d drilled holes to fashion them into masculine jewellery.
Our guy nodded, chewing slowly.
“I think I accidentally became a high priest of grief.”
Duane took a sip of warm Gatorade.
“Better than sales.”
Why Did I Write That?
You may remember the viral Reddit post that this is based on. Fear not, I don’t live in the US and I didn’t find any bottle… if I did I would just throw it back. But I couldn’t help conjuring an image of “our guy” from the story, and what would happen if someone like that found the ashes. I based the character and his dialogue on Dril from Weird Twitter (remember him, he was Mozart to my Salieri and I wrote about him in a book. Yeah, i love dril).
Anyway, I would hate it if the person whose mum was real whose post went viral did read this story and got offended. It’s NOT a satire about her. It’s a satire about the way that post went viral, the Grief Tourism that internet trolls hate so much it makes them create fake RIP pages. Personally an insincere post about ‘sorry for your loss’ to a stranger is far less egregious than making a fake memorial page to troll families of a teenage suicide. Anything that makes this world a slightly nicer place is welcome in our current online maelstrom of indifference and division. My story is here to redress that balance though. I didn’t want to write the story it just came to me, like a message in a bottle.
