“It was a chilly April afternoon when my brother Jacques threw the last handful of my ashes in the Portuguese Jewish Cemetery on 11th Street, east of Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. Just a handful. Most of me went floating out to sea a few weeks earlier, off an inlet bay at the end of Whalebone Landing Road in Sag Harbor. My wife’s ashes were also placed near mine. Our daughter took the plastic bag containing her mother, and spread the chalky leftovers on top of the waves, where they dispersed in a milky form, flowing slowly with the swells, hovering for a while like an aquatic ghost as the water carried her out in laps, back to the shores of Havana where she was born.”

“I’ll Be Around”, excerpt from the upcoming book “Entrances & Exits: A Book of Short Stories”, to be published October 2014.