death is

FADE IN:

INT. FUNERAL HOME - DAY

WIDE SHOT of the outside of a funeral home, slowly tracking through a window into the main room, a small and square room, off-white walls with charcoal carpets. CLOSE UP of an open coffin, sleek mahogany. A picture of a woman with the words 1971—. Glass tables, draped in white cloth. Several bouquets, all with plum colored ribbons with golden letters that read: DEMETER FLORALS.

The funny thing about death that people tend to forget is that it happens all the time. Small deaths occur every single day, everywhere: the last time a local teen visits their favorite coffee shop before leaving for college, a for sale sign being stuck in the yard of a childhood home, a demolition crew striking a historical building to make room for another apartment complex.

Death is growth, death is motion. Death is a closed door, open window.

All of the electricity thrumming through their grey matter circuitry doesn’t disappear because energy can’t be destroyed nor created, just moved around like fumbling electrons searching for the nearest atom to cling to. Somewhere, the energy of every person who’s ever lived and died and been loved is out there, pumping blood through tiny rat veins to their tiny rat heart, or powering a kindling in a fireplace to keep a family warm.

But when a parent dies, this truth becomes a lie. There is no growth, no motion. All that energy is scattered beyond comprehension to the point where it might as well be destroyed. 

Stephanie’s mother is no exception. If anything, she’s a prime example. They knew this was coming for a very long time: it’s sad that Steph spent every day wondering if today her mother’s amalgamation of chronic illnesses would take her. She just didn’t realize how real of a possibility it was until she got the call.

Like a clipped rose, Steph is cut at the base, separated from the roots that held her to earth for her entire life. Her thorns are sharp, despite her pain, colors bright. But inside, every cell dies a slow and painful death.

Death is growth. Death is decay.

SLOW ZOOM on a young woman, mid-twenties, standing in the center of a crowd of people: her family, every single one dressed in black but varying in expense. They chat among themselves as the woman raises a glass of dark wine to her dark lips, downs it in one tip of her chin. Her eyes are puffy, face without makeup. It would be useless to put it on when she’d just cry it away anyway. Even her hair depicts the dark cloud around her: a bun so loose it’s almost a ponytail, strands of her hair pasted to her sweaty forehead. Nobody sees her. She’s a pebble in the middle of a river, merely an obstacle to rush around with little attention paid to it.

The funeral is beautiful. Everything is. Steph arranged none of it, that duty went to her father, but she did choose the flowers. Plum-colored gladiolus, so dark many of the attendees confuse them as black, until the golden light touches their rich petals. Their shared favorites.

Her mother is—was—a florist. People flocked to her shop for her renowned expertise in bouquets, her bottomless knowledge of flowers, their meanings, the care they needed to bloom as brightly as they could. Mom wanted Steph to inherit the plant shop, but Steph left for college instead. She should have that carved into her tombstone, where it will be planted right beside her mother’s.

The shop was sold a year ago, when her mother’s health took a cliff dive. One of their family friends owns it now. If there were anyone to carry on the name, Steph’s glad it was him. She should visit one of these days.

No, it would only hurt more.

Her family, rotten and selfish and greedy but not quite evil, grieve Steph’s mother like a sister, aunt, niece. Her family remembers. They forget about her. They always do.

It’s only a matter of time. Death is forgetting, being forgotten. 

Steph doesn’t collapse like she thought she would when seeing her mother in the casket. She thought she’d shatter with the news alone, explode into glassy dust at the sight of her mother. She cries because of course she does, it’s her mother in that coffin.

OTS of the young woman approaching the coffin, shaking hands grasping the open lid. Her knees quake. She takes in a deep, shuddering breath, and lets go. The woman steps away, pushes her shoulders back, and walks off screen. A few people cross the frame, mouths moving in unheard pleas, chasing the woman.

SLOW ZOOM OUT. CUT TO BLACK.

Many ask her to, some begging, others demanding, but Steph doesn’t speak at her mother’s funeral. She has no words to say that she hasn’t already said to her mother, or words she’ll scream to the heavens when alone and disparaged. Her family doesn’t have the privilege to hear the things exchanged between mother and daughter. They don’t deserve that private piece of her. That’s for Steph to hold. 

CUT TO:

EXT. CEMETERY - DAY

Funeral customs always struck her as odd. Steph understands the metaphor of tossing dirt over a closed casket after it’s rested in its earthly prison—from earth they came, to earth they return. She tries to focus on that and not the pain in her chest. Her mother is still here, in some way. In the earth, in the air, the trees.

EXTREME CLOSE UP of an outstretched hand burrowing into soft, recently dug dirt. Camera tracks as the hand lifts up, grasping the scooped dirt so tight it squeezes out from between her fingers.

Steph fists the dirt but doesn’t throw it. Instead, she stares at the sleek black wood, already peppered with dark brown from the others who’d tossed their handfuls before her.

OTS of the young woman. A breeze ruffles her hair, the last bits held in its bun falling out of place.

Death is motion, under her black sandals as she takes a step away from the open grave, crushing the crunching yellowing grass beneath her heels. It’s in the trees, where their leaves and budding flowers shiver with forecasted winds.

It’s here. Death has found its way to her. 

She doesn’t stick around after the tossing of the dirt. Her worried aunt insists on her staying but Steph leaves the cemetery on foot when nobody’s looking.

FULL SHOT of a woman stumbling away from a cemetery, then walking quickly, then running. She’s breathing heavily, on the cusp of hyperventilating, tears flying back as her hair whips out of its ponytail. Tracks her until she turns a block corner and finds herself in the center of a well-trafficked street, bumbling with people. Families, bridal parties, the occasional hungover student. The woman is still crying. 

EXT. DOWNTOWN VESPA - DAY

As she passes by a lamp post, she checks her phone for the time. It’s been an hour. Steph realizes she’s lost in the growing town once called home. She hasn’t walked through those streets since she was a kid.

She tries to retrace her steps back to the hotel, counting the blocks the way she did when she walked from her house to her favorite book store no longer in business, but her phone dies before she can get proper directions.

It’s warmer than it should be in February, but she shivers regardless, goosebumps from her shoulders to her wrists. Steph rounds a corner, guiding herself blindly across a wide intersection and down the sidewalk that slowly morphs into a walking path alongside a busy bridge.

This, at least, is familiar. She and her parents would walk the length of main street over the bridge to the next town over that no longer exists. Steph loved the trip to her dance teacher’s studio, to her first job where she painted murals on the window panes of the local businesses whose owners were as close as family. Businesses that no longer exist, owners who left long ago.

That’s what death is supposed to be. It’s change. Motion. Death makes room for life. Steph knows that.

Knowing and feeling are not synonymous.

EXT. BRIDGE - DAY

A hand-held cam follows the young woman from behind as she gets to a bridge. Shaky, unsteady, still panicked. She’s still crying.

Cars whiz past her on the bridge. She feels the breeze of the passing vehicles, cool air smelling like exhaust.

She stops walking, peers to the water beyond the waist-high concrete barrier, hands flat on its rounded bar. Her stomach swoops from the dizzying height, the peppered colors of black rocks breaking against the steel blue waves. Bright colored sails disappear under the bridge.

If Steph were to step over the barrier, let the waves below take hold of her, nobody would notice her absence. Her family only saw her as an extension of her mother. An imperfect clone of a perfect woman.

Steph toes off her sandals, hooks her fingers through the straps, and rests them on the barrier. She’s careful not to slip when lifting herself over, one shaking leg at a time, the skirt of her black dress riding above her knees, hands gripping the poles between the concrete. Her skin sticks to the metal from the cold, bordering on pain when she peels them off. 

ECU of the young woman’s red-tinted eyes, her clenched hands, her panythosed feet, toes curled from the cold. ZOOM OUT from the back of her head to reveal the skyline of the city on either side of the river, plumes of smoke escaping a faraway paper mill. Faintly over the harsh winds and a frantic heartbeat, the sound of music and car horns can be heard. 

The air is crisp above the city, smelling faintly of the distant marsh. It’s an unpleasant, nose-scrunching stench she hated as a child but that she’s surprised to find herself missing when she moved away. Now that she’s returned, Steph remembers her disdain for that smell, but breathes it in, an invitation to be overwhelmed by the past in the air. It holds more memories than she realized. 

It was never this loud growing up, all the machinery and cars and tourist chatter. If it was, Steph never noticed. She didn't notice a lot of things as a kid. Even now, she’s oblivious to her surroundings, so stuck in her own head she didn’t think to give condolences to anyone else at the funeral when they loved her mother, too. They deserve comfort, even if she doesn’t. 

As she tilts forward, fighting off the tremor growing in her legs, she’s distracted by a sudden waft of tobacco, smoke skewing her vision.

Cam whips to the left. 

Steph looks to her left.

A few meters away, a young man around her age sits on the barrier, long legs dangling freely over the edge. His messy dark hair catches the warm light, turning honey-brown, and he stares unflinchingly at the blinding sun. He has a cigarette pinched between pursed lips, nimble fingers plucking it away to let smoke escape from his mouth and nose in trickles, then a hefty exhale.

Despite it being that liminal weather between winter and spring, the young man wears shorts and a t-shirt. He’s wearing dinosaur socks. For some reason, that makes her laugh. Steph notices his untied sneakers sitting beside him on the barrier, lying on top of a neatly folded cardigan. The man looks too comfortable for someone sitting hundreds of feet in the air with no safety net beneath him. 

She wonders why he’s up here. Surely not for the same reason as her, given his casual smoking, the air of quiet contemplation and peace surrounding him. The man holds his torso up with one hand on the barrier, the other holding the cigarette towards the sun to examine it in the light. He smiles to himself as he places it in his mouth once again. 

He must feel her eyes on him, because he turns his head, trapping her in a staring contest.

Then he turns away, thin cheeks sucking in even further as he takes a long, exaggerated drag, expels the smoke from his chapped lips, and extinguishes the remaining snub on the barrier. Steph looks behind her, finding nobody coming their way. She wraps her arms tight around the barrier.

There would be no witnesses—except him. She can’t do that to a complete stranger. 

BRIDGE BOY

“Fancy a cigarette?” he asks in a fake British accent, retrieving a carton from his back pocket.

His voice is squeaky and soft, like a teenage boy’s. Maybe he’s younger than she thought. 

Steph shakes her head before realizing he’s not looking her way for an answer. 

STEPH

“I don’t smoke anymore.”

She used to, in high school. She used to do a lot of stupid things.

BRIDGE BOY

“Do you want to?”

It’s not a coercion, moreso an innocent question. 

She looks down. A boat with a white sail floats just beneath her, making its trip across the river.

Steph inches towards him. He taps the carton against the inside of his wrist. A cigarette slips out of the small opening. Before he can catch it, it falls free, a speck of white and orange whirling towards the abyss below. The man doesn’t make an effort to catch it. 

BRIDGE BOY

(in a way that’s not apologetic whatsoever)

“Whoops.”

Steph watches the cigarette for as long as she can before it becomes too miniscule to see, and she wonders how hard it would hit the water. It’s so light, so small, she thinks it would barely make a sound, landing without even a ripple.

Death is quiet and sudden and small. Death is so many things, and her head whirls with it all.

And yet.

All she can focus on right now is the man beside her, who’s chuckling to himself as he waves goodbye to the cigarette.

This time, when he pulls out a cigarette the man catches it and offers the orange end to her. She takes it. He cups his hand around the lighter, thumb striking the flint until a flame appears. Steph leans over to light the cigarette, staring at the ember burning away the paper. The bud turns into a glowing mound of ash.

BRIDGE BOY

(wistful, or bitter)

“I don’t get to smoke often,” the man says. “My brother says it’s bad for my health.”

STEPH

“It is.”

Steph raises the cigarette to her lips. The man catches her wrist, the first contact from another person she’s had in quite some time, and turns the cigarette around.

The sunlight shifts enough for her to see his eyes. Dark like his hair, and impossibly gentle. They’re squinted in a humorous glint.

BRIDGE BOY

“Don’t burn yourself now,” he says.

Steph inhales the bitter smoke in a single drawn out breath. It scratches its way down her throat, into her lungs. She doubles over, coughing so hard her foot slips. A yelp cuts through her coughs, and Steph instinctively reaches for the barrier again, crushing the cigarette between her fingers.

The man puts a hand on her bare shoulder. It shocks her enough to flinch, but he doesn’t move away. He waits until she recovers before letting go. 

BRIDGE BOY

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” he says.

He stands, steady against the wind pushing back.

STEPH

(pretending like she doesn’t know what he means)

“You’re the one who offered the cigarette to me.”

BRIDGE BOY

“It’s like hitting concrete from this high up,” he says, ignoring her. They both look down, to the ephemeral darkness of the water, and a shiver runs through Steph. “You don’t want to hit concrete. That’s why you’re here and not on a roof somewhere.”

STEPH

Before she can tell him she’s not there to jump, just to see the view, she blurts out, “Water’s less messy.”

BRIDGE BOY

“Than concrete?”

Now, she backtracks.

STEPH

(lying)

“I wasn’t planning on jumping.”

Death is motion. Death is the fall. 

The boy laughs, climbing the barrier with the ease of someone who’s done this too many times, and hops safely onto the walking path on the other side. When he’s done taking his time tying his shoes, he looks at Steph. 

BRIDGE BOY

“You’re gonna catch a cold if you stay here too long,” he says.

He stands, offers his hand to her.

Steph looks back at the water. Although she’s already made up her mind to return to ground, the man grabs her wrist, tight and trembling, as if to stop her in case she decides to take her chances with the river. His touch burns, and it takes all of her strength not to jerk away from it, for fear of falling. She doesn’t understand why he’s so concerned for her wellbeing.

After a beat of staring at each other, Steph nods. He nods back.

She allows the man to help her over the barrier, feet shaking the moment they hit the bridge. Her knees buckle. He keeps his grip on her, sturdy for such a thin guy.

BRIDGE BOY

“You scared of heights?” he asks.

STEPH

(scared of heights)

“No,” Steph lies. “Just a little cold.”

Once she’s recovered enough to stand upright on her own, the man hands her the sandals, then drapes his cardigan over her shoulders. Steph grabs the soft sleeves, winds it tighter around her. 

Death is a friend, welcoming everyone with equal warmth. 

The man salutes, his smile breaking across his face like a crack in concrete. 

BRIDGE BOY

“Safe travels.”

He starts walking back towards town, waving to her without turning around. Steph takes a few minutes to ground herself as she puts her shoes back on, heart pounding so much throughout her body that she mistakes it for an earthquake.

She walks back alone.