"Come," he said. "Wipe your eyes, we're nearly there." Jack struggled with the oblong jar he carried wearily in his hands. The torches behind the mill's front door gave it a ghostly yellow shade. The blue night wrapped the lake and fields where the two had come to bury her. Normally the child would be sleeping now, dreaming of a full home and of warm bread, but it was a special night. The father knew what was coming. They gently put on the gloves which kept them from her ashes as they spread her around the windmill. The boy looked up at its great wings, still as death. They placed the empty urn in the lake.  It began to float for a moment before water filled the space where a mother had been and then, quietly, the urn slipped beneath the surface. The child wept again as they made their way around the lake towards the truck they would drive back home, just the two of them. "Wait," the father said, clutching his son's collar to turn him around. "Look." 

And then he saw stars falling. Blue intensities of methane and a thousand things the boy had not learned about yet flared before the two of them. The lake where the urn lay shone in the inverse universe that the boy pretended he lived in sometimes. A universe where his mother did not lose her hair, where his father worked less and everything was right. She lived there now, with the stars that came up from earth bright and blue. Then the father beheld something he'd not seen for months, and he began to weep. The boy, looking at the lake and the windmill and the dust that was once his mother, smiled weakly.