By Zilin Wu

She handed a bouquet of yellow chrysanthemums and white baby’s breath to the family member. 

The mourning hall was small, awash only in plaster white and raven black. Ribbons tied into floral shapes hung from the ceiling to the ground, like intestines spilling from a slit-open abdomen. She carefully avoided them, making her way to the coffin. 

A staff tried to stop her, but a woman, likely the deceased’s mother, intervened. The woman’s eyes were swollen red as she cast a look at her. 

She returned a smile. 

The coffin was no different from the ones she had seen on television, a far cry from the bold personality the deceased once had—surely not chosen personally. The made-up body lay quietly in the enclosure of wooden panels, surrounded by lilies. She noticed that the edges of some lily petals had already yellowed. 

Whether it was the years apart or the fact that they no longer belonged to the same world, the face before her felt unfamiliar. Gone were the dramatic black eyeliner, the glossy red lips, and the sharp voice that pierced through crowds. She could hardly tell if the person in front of her was the same person she once knew. 

“Were you Malan’s classmate?” 

She turned around. The frail, pitiable woman stood beside her. She feigned a move to return to the guest seats, subtly creating distance, but the woman followed her and sat down, pulling a crumpled tissue from her pocket and dabbing her eyes incessantly. 

She nodded. 

“Thank you. None of her close classmates came. Only you still remember her… ” 

The woman’s sobs burst forth with her tears. She leaned back slightly. 

The music softened, and the host began organizing guests to present flowers. She aimed to go first and reached for a flower. 

The tray held only lilies. She paused, scanning the room, and from the disarray of bouquets scattered around, she spotted hers. Under the confused gazes, she walked across the entire mourning hall to retrieve it. 

As she passed row after row of black chairs, she recalled the graduation ceremony years ago. Malan had said to a classmate who was not yet her boyfriend at the time that the flowers given by her mentor were meant for funerals in China. 

That bouquet had been golden mimosa and white anemones. Her mentor had told her that it symbolized spring and hope. 

The malice felt like a thorn lodged in her fingertip—a wound she could never locate despite her attempts to extract it. Then she realized: perhaps the “close classmates” who didn’t show up had also been pricked by this person, now permanently at rest and mercifully devoid of her sting. 

She exhaled a breath of stale air, her muscles, tense with anger for years, finally relaxing. Her hand loosened, and the yellow-and-white bouquet fell onto the coffin lid at last. 

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Zilin Wu is a London-based writer and photographer. She has written many short films, a mini-TV series, and her first feature script. She has a great passion for drama and suspense. She is also dedicated to showing the nuances and undercurrents of interpersonal dynamics in modern society.

By Marcia Yudkin

Who started the rage for framing in Balaceras County?  Some point fingers at Helen Pascombe, owner of Creative Corners, which for a fine fee frames paintings, family portraits and diplomas. She vehemently denies this, adding that if any local shop cashed in big on the craze, it was Loulu’s Lumber, because of the run on two-by-fours in a final phase of the fad.

After 17 interviews, eight of them conducted under a promise of anonymity, I believe it all started with Annie Holbrook and Charlotte Bucha, anthropology majors home for a visit with Annie’s family. Ducking into the Hilltop Hotel to use its facilities, they passed a curl of old rope framed behind glass on a wall near the Ladies Room. They debated what it meant, noting that there was no label indicating the object’s provenance or an attribution to an artist Maybe it was conceptual art, or a reference to past threats against Native Americans in the area?

Or maybe it was an unnoticed whim of the hotel’s decorator, installed when his bill wasn’t paid in full? Charlotte began to skip along the Teapot Trail, inventing more and more preposterous interpretations of the mystery item for her friend Annie.  She picked up four long sticks – hemlock branches, to be precise – and at the mouth of the trail, within sight of the Mama Soto Mart parking lot, she arranged them into a square, placing a tall heap of acorns in the center. Annie and Charlotte left.

Along came Henry DeWitt, known by his VFW poker club to be a devoted friend of squirrels. He first wondered at the acorns, then perceived the four-sided border, slightly askew, around them. So as to more clearly leave the nuts for his rodent pals, Henry snatched up the branches and arranged them around the word “Always” in the Mama Soto advertising slogan some 20 feet away.

The next morning, someone – my sources would not divulge who – had also balanced four branches in a box around the word “Service” on the Mama Soto sign.  

From there, it’s a little hard to trace the sequels of this act, because it was as if a tribe of mischievous and invisible wood nymphs had invaded downtown. Branch-framed items showed up in nooks and corners, then in blatantly public locations, like the lawn in front of the Balaceras County Library. Some framings seemed random and others sloppy, but a few seemed to convey a coded message, like sticks placed around turds that dog walkers had not bothered to clean up.

Then someone upgraded the trend to thin planks of lumber nailed around somethings on the sides of buildings, which must have required ladders in the night. These blossomed like architectural tattoos for several days. KTVV News ran a story at that point, which included two mistakes I’m not going to belabor them for.  

And then it was Halloween, when at least seven kids too small to really appreciate the county-wide joke dressed up as themselves surrounded by a frame. Little Donna Lovejoy, for instance, trick-or-treated this way on Lantern Oak Lane. I suspect that the eye-rolling she and other children got for their costumes contributed to the next development, which was – nothing. All the mock framing stopped.  Finito.

And framing went back to something reserved for antique maps, Aunt Tillie’s pastels, Jerome’s law license and Jennifer’s favorite photo of her Schnauzer, Sallie.  No artifacts of the madness remain. In a generation, will anyone recall this community-wide prank?

*   *   *

The author of fiction in Yankee, Writers Forum, Flash Fiction and New Stories from New England, Marcia Yudkin advocates for introverts through her newsletter, Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com/).  Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Next Avenue and NPR.  She lives in Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960).