The wisest man I ever met was called Higgs. He lived at the edge of the village and the village was at the edge of the world. When I was young, during the holidays or at weekends, I would often go to his place. We would play cards or do a jigsaw puzzle if the weather wasn’t good. If it wasn’t raining, we would be outside in the garden. There were always chores to be done, leaves to be raked up, seedlings to be planted out, vegetables and fruit to be harvested. I loved to help. And as we worked Higgs would keep up a gentle rambling commentary on the world around us. He had stories and old wisdom to pass on, and I liked to listen.

Now as I write, so many years later, and as the fine powder drifts against the windows, I recall something else Higgs would say over and over, almost as a refrain or a chorus. We are all dust. Or, perhaps, we are but dust. 

When I asked him what he meant, he quoted the Bible to me. Genesis, he said. For dust thou art—tapping my chest with his pointing finger, keeping time—and unto dust shalt thou return.

Dust. I remember thinking, what is dust?

We had several dictionaries at home, and I found in one of them this example of usage: “The dictionaries were covered in dust.” 

Isn’t that odd? 

And then elsewhere within those disintegrating pages:

Something worthless, very small particles of earth or sand. A fine powder which consists of very small particles of a substance such as gold, wood, or coal. A fine dry powder consisting of earth or waste matter lying on the ground or on surfaces or carried in the air. Fine particles of matter (as of earth). Spilth. The particles into which something disintegrates. Dirt, sand, flakes or filth. Soot, ashes, fragments. Dried earth reduced to powder. A cloud of finely powdered earth or other matter in the air. The surface of the ground. A fine dry powder. Something worthless. 

And this too: 

The earth, as the resting place of the dead. The earthly remains of bodies once alive; the remains of the human body. Debris. The shadow of life.

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Now as I write, and as our planet falls ever closer to permanent night, dead cells, ancient pollen, presolar grains, even the irons and silicates from meteorites immolated at the ends of their unimaginable journeys settle gently upon me and upon everything I can see. And particles of skin and hair from the people who lived in this house hundreds of years ago, and their ancestors, too. And carbon that once formed the eye of a bird or the leaves of the ferns that lived deep in the primeval forest. Time is like a cloak. Hundreds of thousands of years drift on the air currents. Millions of years. Spinning. Spiralling. Drifting. Adrift. Motes containing traces of hydrogen and lithium from the beginning of everything tumble in the unstill air. 

So it is that the unravelling universe forms a veil which pours slowly through these rooms and if the daylight comes in at the correct angle I can see a spiral galaxy, a supernova, a shooting star burning to pieces as it enters our atmosphere, a halo.

What Higgs meant, I now think, is that all matter is in the grip of transformation. We are dust. It is dust that courses through our veins. 

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When he died, Higgs was cremated. They burned him up. 

I was the only one there, brought back to that remote stretch of coast by a letter from a solicitor. He had been the only son of an only son and his family were long gone. Even so, I was surprised there was no one else in attendance. Outside the crematorium a cold wind blew. The ceremony was perfunctory, hurried, unbefitting of the man. It was deeply dispiriting. At the end, the curtains jerked open—I thought of a puppet theatre—and the coffin shuddered forward into the darkness beyond. For a moment I thought it would get stuck only halfway in, and wondered what would then happen, what that might signify.

As per his instructions, I took his ashes and cast them into the sea. 

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Ben Tufnell is a writer and curator based in London. His stories have been included in Best British Short Stories 2024, Conjunctions, Litro, Storgy and Structo, amongst others. His debut novel, The North Shore, was published by Fleet (Little, Brown) in 2023.