Departure: 20:22

Sensitive themes: Pet death, cremated remains, grief.

“What’s this?” the airport employee asked, pointing at the screen displaying the suitcase’s X-rayed contents. “I can see some kind of powder.”

Ellie looked at the screen, then shifted her tired gaze to the woman in uniform. They had already asked Ellie that question twice today: at the entrance and at check-in.

“My cat’s ashes.”

The reply she got was a look of disgusted bewilderment, as if the idea of hauling something like that on an international trip could only occur to a crazy person. Probably if she’d said the jar contained heroin, she would have met with more understanding. At least heroin had an obvious use.

Ellie carefully took the bubble-wrapped container out of her suitcase. Plastic, black, about the size of a teacup, it looked both mournful and depressingly cheap. She suspected the pet crematorium had bought it from a Halloween décor aisle.

For keeping the ashes of a beloved pet on a bedside table, it had been perfectly adequate. But not for an international flight.

“Do you have transport documents for it?”

She did not.

While the cat was alive, nobody had been especially concerned with his administrative status. Ellie had taken him in off the street about fifteen years earlier, and all the paperwork he’d acquired in his lifetime amounted to a medical file at the vet clinic. Before leaving, she had meant to get him a cat passport, a microchip, vaccinations, and all the other attributes of a law-abiding pet. But first, as it turned out, he needed an inflamed tooth removed. Apparently, the elderly cat, like Ellie’s parents, had shown no enthusiasm for emigration. Unlike her parents, the cat could be taken without his voluntary consent.

He solved the problem more radically, by not surviving the anesthesia. In a certain sense, it had been an act of patriotism. In life, he had never needed a passport. In death, however, things had become noticeably more complicated.

“Sorry, but what documents are required to transport a dead cat?”

“A death certificate and a seal on the urn stamped by the crematorium. Otherwise, I can’t clear it for transport.”

“But… it’s a cat. He doesn’t have a death certificate.”

“Those are the rules. How am I supposed to know it really is a cat? It’s some kind of powder of unknown origin. Even if it is ashes and not drugs or anthrax, how am I supposed to know whose ashes they are? It’s a violation of veterinary law, the rules for transporting biological materials, and who knows what else.”

“Well, do you want me to show you?” Ellie pulled at the lid. After all, this was the most direct way to solve the problem: one look at the gray ash, where one could still make out tiny bones and cat teeth, would make it hard to mistake it for anything else.

That impulse, however, met with no approval. The woman who a minute earlier had demanded proof of what was inside the plastic urn flinched away, waving her hands in horror.

“Are you out of your mind? Put that away! I do not want to look at that! If you don’t have the documents, you can leave it in a storage locker.”

For a moment, Ellie didn’t know what to say.

“Well, or just dump it out here if you don’t want to pay for storage. You can take the empty jar with you in your carry-on. No objections to that.”

The woman jerked her chin toward a large trash bin for everything that had failed security. As if they were talking about a bottle of water or a folding umbrella.

Ellie made one more attempt.

“Maybe you could at least look yourself. You’d be able to see there’s nothing else in it…”

“I don’t need to look inside for that,” the employee said, her voice taking on a tired, patronizing tone. “What I need is a seal with a stamp. Paper saying it’s ashes. Documented remains. Do you understand? Either that, or nothing.”

There was no point arguing any further. The employee clearly trusted a seal more than her own eyes.

***

15:42

Four hours remained until boarding.

Ellie stepped aside to the wall, set her suitcase, backpack, and document folder on the floor, and dialed the clinic. A delay in the flight meant she still had quite a lot of time to try to obtain the necessary paperwork.

The conversation with the vet was not especially helpful. The best veterinary clinic in the city, where Ellie had first taken the cat for surgery and later collected the urn with his ashes, was hearing for the first time that dead cats needed more travel documents than living ones.

“I’m sorry, but how exactly am I supposed to issue a death certificate for a cat who has no other documents? What’s more, I’ve never even met him personally.”

“But I wasn’t given anything either after he died or after the cremation, and now I can’t get through airport security. What am I supposed to do? The clinic must still have his medical file…”

“Miss…” The doctor’s voice on the other end softened. “I understand, but I can’t issue a certificate like that retroactively. Unless it’s absolutely necessary…”

Ellie nodded quickly, forgetting he couldn’t see her.

“Necessary! Very, very necessary!”

“It can be arranged. I could issue you a certificate for another cat. We happen to have one from today. It wouldn’t be expensive, though I’d probably have to come to some arrangement with the owner of the deceased as well. But I don’t think he’d object if, for example, you paid for the cremation.”

Ellie closed her eyes. Apparently, after death, pets became much more interchangeable.

“Thank you,” she said. “And would it be possible to get a stamped seal on the urn with that certificate?”

Silence hung on the other end of the line.

“Well, that’s no longer up to me. You could try going to the crematorium, though they’re only open Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Maybe in the capital they put stamped seals on cats, but around here, probably not. It is a pet crematorium after all, not a human one…”

Ellie thanked him and ended the call. Even with a death certificate for a completely unrelated cat, they still would not allow the urn through without a seal. Once again, she silently cursed herself for not checking everything in advance. It had never occurred to her that after death the cat would become such a bureaucratic problem.

I should’ve said it was powdered face mask or hair dye. Who would’ve checked? she thought irritably. What the hell possessed me to tell the truth?

***

16:22

Three hours and twenty minutes remained until boarding.

Ellie stared helplessly at the light pink suitcase containing everything she had planned to take with her. A set of essentials: documents, laptop, chargers, medication, two sweaters, jeans, underwear, a makeup bag, a toothbrush. After selling her share of the apartment to relatives, she had left behind without hesitation the tons of knickknacks accumulated over the years, her collection of T-shirts with cute prints, her books, her Ikea dinnerware. She could replace almost all of it. A life compressed into eight kilos of carry-on luggage contained, for the most part, only replaceable things.

The only irreplaceable thing sat inside the plastic urn. If Ellie had had a crowd of inconsolable relatives seeing her off at the airport, she could have sent the little urn back with them…

She tried calling someone from her family or circle of friends, but nobody was willing either to come all the way to the airport or to accept a package containing “a dead cat” into their home. Every person she called reacted with the same horror and hurried refusal, eager to distance themselves from the dubious container. As if Ellie were trying to make them accomplices to a crime by asking them to help dispose of a body.

“It’s just a little jar! There’s nothing scary about it…” she explained for the fifth time, but the agitated voice on the line remained firm:

“No way. As if I needed dead cats in my house.”

“Oh, come on. I can’t just throw him away.”

“Better throw it away than keep something that disgusting. And why did you even drag it to the airport? They’ll probably say it’s trafficking or something…”

“Trafficking what?” Ellie asked, bewildered. “Dead cats?”

“I don’t know,” the voice on the line turned quieter and meaner. “Who knows what. What difference does it make? These days they’ll lock you up for anything…” The line went dead in frightened silence.

While Ellie sat on the floor by an outlet, clinging to the phone beside her plugged-in charger, people moved past with bland indifference, glancing only occasionally at the bewildered girl. But in an airport, that kind of sight surprised no one. Distractedly, she worried at the edge of the film covering the small black-and-white tattoo of a cat’s face on her forearm. The cat looked oddly serene.

***

17:42

Two hours remained.

Ellie set her paper cup of strong coffee on the polished table in front of her—next to the ill-fated urn. The two were almost the same size. Similar in color and shape, too, except that the cup bore a cheery slogan: One Smile Closer to Your Dream.

Ellie did not feel like smiling.

The idea of getting rid of the urn and stuffing the ashes into her pockets had already occurred to her, but after a brief consideration she had rejected it as insane. Ellie vividly imagined herself absentmindedly forgetting to shake them out of her jeans before doing the laundry. Only one thing would be worse: scattering them right here, between the coffee shop and duty-free.

Her phone kept vibrating. Notifications from the work chat popped up one after another. The new project was in full swing, and the short leave she had taken for the move did not exempt her from the need to keep her finger on the pulse. Working for an international company was the main reason for the move in the first place. Because of the sanctions, she could no longer receive her salary while staying in her home country. Of the two options—quit or leave—Ellie had chosen to leave.

“So what am I supposed to do with you?” Ellie murmured, absently picking at the film on her forearm with her fingernail. The fresh tattoo stung a little, but not too badly.

She stared distractedly at the television screen. The sound was off, but a slick-haired anchor was clearly in full flow. Not long ago, the people on television had tried to outdo one another with expensive suits and gold watches. Now the anchor kept tugging at the tight collar of a military uniform, his face red with strain as he shook his fist at the camera. Even with the sound off, it was obvious he was talking about something especially patriotic. About how we will defeat all our enemies because we stand for goodness and humanity, and how the country is laughing at any sanctions...

***

19:22

Exactly thirty minutes until boarding.

The girl with the pink suitcase stepped out through the airport doors. The sharp-eyed taxi drivers lying in wait for newly arrived travelers immediately began waving and calling out to her. But to their disappointment, she stopped by the flowerbed in front of the main entrance. It was meant to brighten the facade, but without proper care it looked a little shabby and forlorn.

Ellie allowed herself exactly three minutes of doubt.

She could leave the urn in a storage locker and promise herself that one day she would come back for it from this makeshift columbarium. She could choose not to fly at all. To hell with the ticket, the plans, the deposit she had already paid on the apartment…

“Forgive me,” Ellie said. “Either you stay here, or I do.”

Unscrewing the lid of the plastic urn, she emptied the ashes into the patch of scraggly petunias. The gray ash rose in a light cloud of dust, then at once darkened as it settled on the damp earth.

***

She kept watching the airport building for a long time as the plane, humming, lurched heavily into motion. Beneath the film on her forearm, the cartoon cat’s face seemed to be looking out the window too, watching the city recede below.

Dear passengers, please fasten your seat belts…

Ellie put on her headphones and leaned back in her seat.