Lens Cleaner

He'd watched Joyce's right hand resting, wrist up on her knee, for the entire ride home that day. She'd pinched the bridge of her aquamarine bifocals between her thumb and index finger as if escorting a specimen to a laboratory. When she'd walked into their bedroom, she pulled a supple lens cloth from her bedside table and swabbed it smoothly across the left lens capturing a sample of the coarse grit of their son's ashes. When she was done, she'd placed the cloth into a tiny plastic zip-pouch, and tucked it away. On her way out of the room, she'd dropped the glasses into her pink plastic wastebasket with a hollow plunk that neither startled nor soothed either of them. Today, the loose ends of her illness, their life together sufficiently cauterized, Omar rescued the sealed up lens cloth from it's place in her nightstand drawer, and moved it to his side of the bed.