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by eve shapiro

In an enormous old gymnasium with badly painted walls and shiny wood floors at a public school in a suburb of Philadelphia, there is a funeral of sorts taking place. Thirty people mill around and speak in hushed, anxious tones, as if waiting for an event each one believes is a surprise for the rest. Every person is clothed in neon yellow.

A teenage girl in a yellow skirt, black flats and a black top sits on a gray folding chair in a corner, her older brother in black slacks and a yellow top beside her. Together, they’re staring up at a collage of pictures of their cousin covering the entire wall. There are photos of him as a toddler at the top of a slide, as a middle schooler at a piano recital, as a college student on a beach with his arm around a pretty girl, as a grad student in a bookstore in Madrid. 

One of the photos flutters down, the one from that long ago piano recital, and the girl slides off her chair onto the ground to pick it up. She has no way to reattach it, but she can’t leave it there. She slips it into her pocket instead. There’s a bitter taste in her throat and tension through all of the muscles in her body; she wants someone she can yell at. Instead she bites down on the inside of her lip and leans her head back against the wall. 

The pretty girl from the beach photo, older now, is dressed in a yellow wrap dress with a carefully pinned braided bun atop her head. Once upon a time she was his girlfriend, and now she is walking to the doorway of the room to greet two newcomers to his funeral. She can’t remember who they are. “Thank you so much for coming!” she says, smiling at them. “I know he would have been so happy to see you here.” 

“Oh, of course!” says one of the new arrivals. “It’s just a fantastic idea for a memorial, to have it be like a– a celebration of life, with all the yellow, instead of just depressing black. You know, I bet he’s looking down at us and enjoying all this right now.”

The girl with the braided bun doesn’t believe in heaven, or cliches.  “I’d like to think so, too,” she says. She lets her smile fall a little and gestures at someone who isn’t there. “I seem to be being called over! There are refreshments against the back wall if you’d like them.” They walk away, and she walks towards the person who has gestured to her, the one who doesn’t really exist. Her back to the rest of the room, she places her fingers against her temple and sighs, questioning her inability to feel anything but tired. Perhaps she is a terrible person, but that isn’t a thought she has time or energy to dwell on, so she turns to try and find if there is anyone she hasn’t spoken to yet. 

In the hallway outside the room stands a small boy in an ugly yellow suit. It looks terribly uncomfortable, and his mother thinks this might be why he is crying. She is leaning down so that she can look at him at eye level, her hand on his arm. “What’s going on?” she asks. “Do we need to go home and find you something else to wear?” The little boy shakes his head vigorously. “What is it, then?” says the mother. 

The boy crosses his little arms across his chest, dislodging his mother’s hand, and says through tears, “I don’t understand why they’re all acting so normal. No one is even talking about him.” 

His mother sighs. She doesn’t know what to tell him, so she just crouches down and gives him a hug. He uncrosses his arms and reaches them around her, leaning his head against her shoulder. 

In the center of the room is a small group of friends, dressed in all manner of different yellow clothes. None of them are wearing any black at all. None of them are appreciating this memorial. “This is bullshit,” says a woman with short hair. “The whole point of this was to celebrate him, to tell stories and make fun of him and play his favorite songs on repeat at a completely intolerable volume. Not to have a normal fucking memorial where no one acknowledges him except to say ‘Oh, he would have loved this,’ as if anyone can know that.” She looks around at the room again and shakes her head. “Hey, at least everyone’s wearing yellow!” 

The two men across from her in the cluster nod along with her words. Her girlfriend, standing beside her, squeezes her hand and then walks over to the cousins in the corner by the photo collage. “Can I grab a chair?” she says, and one of the cousins nods at her despite his obvious confusion. She drags the chair to the center of the room and steps up onto it. 

“Hey, everyone!” she calls out to the room. “Can I have your attention, please?” 

The room slowly quiets. 

“I’d like to open up the floor if anyone has stories that they’d like to share about Daniel.” The room is full of people staring at her and no one has raised a hand, so she announces, “I’ll start.”

Near the doorway is a man wearing a yellow sweater, listening as one person after another steps up onto the rickety folding chair to tell stories about Daniel. Some are sweet, some are funny, some are mocking, some are tragic, some are nostalgic. The man listening barely knew Daniel beyond small talk in an office, and he wishes his response were sadness over this loss, at the fact that they’ll never again make awkward small talk and that they’ll never get to know each other beyond that, but it isn’t. Instead, he is filled with a sort of wistful ache, a wish to believe that this many people would stand on a rickety chair to tell stories about him. He can barely think of one person who knows him this well. 

Standing by a wall in a black dress and a yellow cardigan is Daniel’s mother. There are tears on her cheek that she doesn’t bother to wipe away. She’s listening to his friends and his girlfriend tell stories about someone kind and funny and smart and thoughtful, and it sounds like him, but also someone confident and idiosyncratic in ways she’s never known him to be. She’s aware of how silly it seems, to be standing there at her son’s memorial, crying not because he’s gone but because she never knew that he liked heist movies, but it doesn’t matter. She can’t seem to stop.

When the memorial is over, and any evidence it left has been cleared away, and the people have all filed out, the pretty girl with the yellow wrap dress and the braided bun is still there, sitting in a little ball in the center of the empty room. She’s taken her hair out so that it falls in messy waves around her shoulders. Her head is on her knees and her hands are clasped around her ankles. She isn’t crying. Her breathing is careful and controlled, as if she’ll forget to inhale if she doesn’t think it through. She sits like this as long as she can. Eventually someone comes in to tell her that the building is closing, and she’s forced to smile at them and walk out into the cold.