The cigar emporium stands across the street from the crematorium, so each evening as the old Cuban men set up their white plastic table and play their white plastic dominoes, gnarled fingers of cheap cigars burning between their teeth, the intersection grows gray and thick with mixed smoke. Tobacco leaves and blackened bones, tar, skin, embers and ashes.

Dominico cheats so Dominico wins. The other men don’t mind. It’s only fair. They all cheat, sometimes, and they pay the loose change they’d placed on the game without malice. Dominico drops his loot nickel by nickel into a worn woolen tube sock tied around his belt loop. His friends snuff out their cigars, leave Dominico to enjoy his triumph alone. He puffs as the setting sun sets the smoke ablaze, all burnt orange and honey yellow, red.

A woman in a black smock emerges from the crematorium, double-paned glass doors swinging shut behind her. In her hand, a Ziploc baggie, contents clacking. On her smock, streaks of crusty white. Something in Dominico catches her, forces her to stare, to stop. He waves her over, asks what’s in the bag. She says she’ll play him for it. He smiles with pitted sallow teeth. She sees in them, and in the deep creases of his forehead, the crows’ feet, the sunken dimples of his sagging cheeks, an eerily familiar face she long thought gone. Dominico puts down his nickel sock for collateral and carefully clicks each rectangle onto the table.

Dominico doesn’t cheat. Dominico has no need. The woman doesn’t know the rules, doesn’t want to win, tosses down the baggie almost before she’s beaten.

Dominico asks her name and she’s gone. He calls into the dusk that swallowed her. She doesn’t turn. She can’t bear that face any longer, the face of a ghost whose smile lines went slack, whose leather-brown skin burned to gray ash, a face she prays will stay away. It is only when she’s certain the curtain of smoke veils the face that she looks back. Through the darkness

a faint spot glows, the cigar cinder pulsing with the old man’s steady breath, brilliant but fading like a tender bruise.

Inside the baggie Dominico finds a wedding band, the titanium ball-and-socket of an artificial hip, and a tiny silver filling, cool to the touch and ridged with miniscule divots. He turns the trinkets in his fingers until ash falls on his dominoes. Then he crushes the cigar and the night goes black.

Soon he will lose the wedding band to another game of chance. He will sell the hip joint for scrap. But the filling, that little silver stone, he will place in his pocket and there it will stay, pressed between his matches and the warm flesh of his thigh, until the day it will return to the bottom of the oven inside the building across the street where all the inorganic bits eventually settle.