There is a picture of my uncle riding a bicycle and smoking a cigarette; he's thirteen. The cigarette dangles from his lips, and the lips are cracked into a devilish smile for the audience. The handle bars are turned towards the camera, and he stands posed so someone could snap the shutter, freezing him there forever.

My mother holds several pictures, taken from a manila envelope. "To help us remember him," she explains. I lie and tell her I think it's a nice idea.

We stand on the Coney Island boardwalk, cold, in the early morning glow: my mother passing out photographs, my brother keeping a look-out for the cops, and me watching for anyone who might take offense to our funeral procession.

Behind us sits a backdrop of faded signs and ruined roller coasters. Coney Island, once America's playground, has decayed into a collection of empty lots and carnival freak shows. At the heart of it lie the remaining traces of a lost history: a few square blocks of skill games, carnie barkers, and amusement park rides.

On 17th street, a long wooden pier juts off the shoreline and reaches over the water. At the entrance, a middle aged couple lies across a wooden bench. The man is asleep; his hand wrapped tightly around a bottle. The woman, running her fingertips through his hair, watches us as we march past them. Beneath their bench, a hand sized radio plays a slow requiem. Next to it a toaster-oven sits with its door open, a seagull pecking at the crumbs inside.

We walk to the edge of the pier, and I open the plastic box, taking out the bag of ashes. I feel as if I'm holding a goldfish bag, like one you might win at a fair, but my uncle is no goldfish; more like a Japanese fighter, he puts on a good show. You can't tell his one good kidney failed or that the other one is missing completely. Nor can you see that his pirate like beard was once red, to match his freckled skin and beating heart. If you'd seen him in life, you'd think his remains would be a strawberry tint, but every grain of him has turned a silvery gray — almost white.

A portly man in greasy shorts stands about twenty feet from us. He takes off his hat, folds his hands in front of him, and lowers his eyes. When I look over he nods as if he had known my uncle, whose funeral he is now attending. Perhaps he was once a member of Uncle Paul's Coney Island gang.

There is another picture. He's about nine, and his left eye is purple around the lid. Boxing gloves are tied to his wrists as he sits on a milk crate, exhausted. His hair is a wild mangle, painted the color of blood, and his eyes peer into the camera, perhaps asking the photographer if he would like some too.

I open the bag and say some words about my uncle. When I finish my mother says, "Amen" as if we are in a church. My uncle hated church; God had betrayed him, but if every man has a church in his heart, then Coney Island was his. After the "Amen", my brother throws in "Godspeed!", and I begin to pour the ashes over the handrail. His remains do not cloud into a puff of smoke or blow back at us; he catches no devil's wind, though Grandma said he would. My uncle flows: toes and tears, rotten liver and lungs, drunken nights and daydreams. He flows steady and heavy into the sea, more like a liquid than something of flesh.

I hold my breath as seagulls swoop in to taste him. They gather around, a ceiling of birds, threatening us with poorly aimed droppings. My mother puts her hands over her head and begins to laugh; my brother follows. A warm shot glances my ear, and I bellow out, pouring more haphazardly. By the time I pour Uncle Paul from head to toe we are surrounded by shit and laughing breathlessly. He would have approved such a burial.

There's a third picture of my uncle. At seven, it's the youngest of him we have. The night before the photo, he fed his dog some bits of glass. By the morning, the dog, his best friend, was dead. My uncle cries through inflamed eyes, and from his fist a stream of blood pours down where he has beaten it against a wall.

I look away from the picture and wonder, what cruel photographer has cemented these memories into our history? I wonder why there are no photos of him saving our lives from catastrophic boredom or telling us the hard truth about the birds and the bees. Had he broken the family camera by then?

I crumple-up the plastic bag, tuck the pictures into the envelope, and stuff the envelope into my mother's pocket. The photos only tell part of the truth, and someday soon they too will turn to dust.

Joseph Thayer is an expatriate of New York, living in the Hills of northern New Jersey with his wife and two children. In Jersey they pitched a big top and perform circus acts nightly. His work has appeared in Slow Trains, Ramble Underground, Outsider ink, GHOTI, and Underground Voices. He was awarded Honorable Mention in the New Letter's Annual Short Story Contest.