Laura Harrier

I've seen it done nicely with votive or pillar candles.

That's something.

We could do that.

What about maybe also some roses?

The woman felt warmth, as if in response, the automatic plant misters her daughter had helped her install just two weeks prior came on all around them, creating instant cloud banks at all the windows.

Yes, peach roses, because his wife would have been encouraging him to live an authentic life.

It would have been an extended project of her telling him that he wasn't being his own true self and he was too often fearful.

And he, in his ill-fitting hipster blue pants, would have been resistant, maybe even slamming his hand on the dining room table and going to the back porch to smoke if she pushed too hard.

But then, and it would have been just before she died, just before he could tell her about it, a little boy at the mall, hearing a woman scream from the elevator, grabbed his hand because it was the nearest and closest thing to comfort.

And it would have been at that moment, feeling the boy's soft, damp skin, that the man would have understood his wife's message about being governed by fear.

She had opened this window for him and then died.

So suddenly, so unexpectedly, that was it.

That was the great volcanic blast that had left him as dry as an old locust husk under the picnic table.

Yes, exactly.

They certainly can be.

Unfortunately, the businessmen around here send them when they close a deal, if there's a woman involved.

But that's not the real message.

There's supposed to be a more real form of gratitude, more selfless.

Have arrangements been made for a place to host the funeral?

The woman went to the back of the store again and opened the walk-in cooler.