by Joshua Dean, art by Aileen Sandoval

Nearly every night for the past two weeks, Joseph Hall has had the same dream. He’s visiting a hospital room that is always a little too cold and a little too gray. He’s sitting with Elliot, laughing over something that doesn’t matter. The doctor comes in to say, Actually, your results are looking much better than expected. You have a real shot of getting through this. They have a chance. 

This is always the part when Joseph realizes it’s a dream. But he never tries to change it. In this dream, the boy he loves is still alive. In this dream, Elliot is still twenty-three. His birthday’s next week. They talk about the kind of cake Joseph will bring. Chocolate, he promises. Elliot gasps, and makes him swear to bake it himself. Joseph nods his head, and this is always around where the dream fades away into the sound of his alarm clock. For the past two weeks now, Joseph greets every morning with tears, and Elliot is forever twenty-three. 

Today is Elliot’s funeral. It’s a solemn affair, but a vehement reminder that funerals are for the living. It’s held in a stuffy funeral home, a cheap poster board front and center in the chapel with a photo of Elliot from six years ago, a pixie cut and gauges, grinning into the camera with the wrong name emblazoned in a flourish under his face. The urn is on display, but the bouquets of lilies that wreath it far dwarf it in size, their fat white blossoms hanging heavy, making the urn look smaller and duller. Among the lilies, relatives clad in semi-formal black attire wring emotion out of themselves over a boy they haven’t seen in almost six years. 

Uninvited to this event, Joseph only found out through a family member who felt bad about the whole thing: a kindly aunt who was sweet enough to secretly invite him but too afraid of what would happen to stand up for either of them. 

Joseph looks down at the urn, then up at the bouquets of flowers, trying to not let the tears forming in his eyes drip onto the metal. “He hated lilies.”

The family member next to him, some distant uncle, nods with a vague placating smile, and Joseph feels something turn and choke inside him, and this is the moment he resolves he needs to give Elliot a better way to be remembered. At least something without lilies. 

“How could you do this to him?” he asks in the silence, and it wavers throughout the whole room. Elliot’s family looks at him with confusion. 

His mother strides forward. “You weren’t invited, Joseph,” she states plainly. He used to hate her for how she treated Elliot. Then, he put that hate aside to begrudgingly interact with her as Elliot got sicker. But now Elliot is dead. The hate comes back. “This is a family event. I’m sure you can put together a friend memorial later.” 

“Hello, Sarah. Any friends I’d invite would know him better than any person here. Besides, what’s with the photo of him as a kid? Do you not have any recent photos of him?”

 “The photo is … older than we wanted, but it shows her as my daughter,” Sarah pauses to dab at tears in her eyes. “Can you blame a mother for that?” Her voice is full of unearned grief, and Joseph frowns.

Joseph straightens his posture to meet her eyes even though she’s still an inch taller, “He deserved better than this.” 

“What do you mean, better than a reunion with her family who loved her?”

 “Are you releasing his ashes? At least?” he asks. He knows the answer, he just wants her to say it out loud. 

“She’s going to our mausoleum, where she belongs, with family.” 

This argument is pointless. Family, to her, is an inescapable tie. To Elliot, it was a noose. “You were never there for him.” Not the way he was.

“I was there! I paid for every medical bill after she ignored me for six years, no questions asked. She didn’t even let me in the hospital room. I stood in the hallway while she died holding your hand.” Tears form in her eyes again, and she doesn’t wipe them away. The funeral party turns to stare at Joseph. 

Joseph thinks back to the week Elliot first knew he was going to die. His confession of love at the time was rushed—tinged with fear and already full of grief. Love and fear had always been connected for Elliot, the whole time Joseph had known him. Joseph had watched the person Elliot became when he was around his family. How their love meant pain. Elliot was in love with Joseph. Elliot was terrified of dying, not the death part so much as what came after. He was afraid of being erased. Joseph looks at the lilies again, and finally decides to speak. 

---

Family, to her, is an inescapable tie. To Elliot, it was a noose.

---

“You never understood him,” he tries, looking only at Sarah. “I loved him, and it hurt him so much that you never tried to understand him. This isn’t what he wanted, and you know it, even if no one else here does. He deserves to be free.” He meets her gaze, holding firm despite both of their tears. Sarah’s face wavers for a moment. She opens her mouth to speak, to give him an answer, but no words come out. It strikes him that she looks helpless, more like a little kid than a parent. In this moment, he forgives her. 

He leaves the funeral home. He doesn’t look back. He doesn’t need to, to understand.

•

That night, it all comes to him in a series of steps, like he’s known how to do this his whole life. He arrives early, his car tucked around the corner. He becomes part of the scenery. It’s easy to disappear, he’s learned. Night comes, and Joseph watches the ancient groundskeeper totter around like a man who will soon join the tombs he cares for, and waits until the last light goes out. Then he enters the cemetery, walking on the mossy cobblestone path littered with pebbles from the erosion of a near-neverending stream of grieving souls. It’s dark, but the moon

is full tonight as it lights his path, coating the ground in silver. Joseph walks for a while in silence, eyes squinting to read the etchings above each small stone building he comes across. The quiet hangs in the air like cold fog, and Joseph can feel it pressing into his lungs. This is a terrible place to stay, living or dead. 

At last he finds it, parsing out the worn lettering above the archway. The mausoleum aches in the wind, a quiet cacophony of the many generations of Elliot’s family who have lived and died in this town. Joseph prepares the crowbar but the door swings open easily without even creaking. He doesn’t think about what that could mean. 

He turns on the flashlight, looking for the shiny but plain urn. “Found you,” he whispers as he removes the urn from its shelf. The walk out of the cemetery is still quiet, but it’s a lighter kind of quiet. Joseph takes a deep breath. 

When he reaches his car, he pulls a piece of shiny plastic off of the dashboard where he had left it. “Here,” Joseph addresses the urn as he carefully sticks a nametag over the engraving, “For the ride.” Hi! My name is Elliot, it reads. His car coughs awake, the headlights a dim and warm yellowish-orange. “There, that’s better,” he looks at the urn with a smile. “Baked you the cake you asked for,” he gestures to the floor of the car, where a cake box rests. “Are you feeling the beach, or maybe the hill where we had that picnic? Don’t worry, we can decide on the way.” He places a hand reassuringly on the metal, and for a moment it feels warm.

---

Joshua Dean is a senior English major and self-proclaimed Columbo scholar at UC Berkeley. Elliot is one of his oldest stories.

Aileen Sandoval works at Monterey Peninsula College as a Human Resources Specialist and is involved in initiatives to hire diverse, equitable and inclusive faculty to better serve the educational experiences of underrepresented groups. Following the completion of her undergraduate studies at California State University Monterey Bay, she has dedicated her time in refining her painting skills so that she can one day teach entry-level drawing classes at the community college level. She was born in Los Angeles, California and currently lives in Monterey, California with her partner.