Forty-Nine Roses by CJ Julisch

Where does honesty fit in the brittle balance between grief and social conventions? In CJ Julisch’s flash fiction piece “Forty-Nine Roses,” a narrator who struggles to communicate and engage with the world outside of her mind is forced to navigate the receiving line of well-wishers and platitudes at her parents’ funeral. By aligning readers with a narrator who, as she expands in her author’s note, “not only notices and catalogs everything, but also isn’t quite adept at communicating in a compressed, emotional moment,” Julisch ensures that each interaction holds a propulsive weight, tension, and uncertainty. As the narrator drifts away from her present environment and into her mental happy place—her family’s library—Julisch clarifies that this pulling away, this pulling inward, is her opportunity to translate “her loss into language she trusts.” Allowing a reader into this trust and mental haven is quite a gift, as access into the narrator’s interiority grants Julisch’s audience the opportunity to observe the peaceful, joyful nuances of the narrator’s relationship with her vibrant parents. Through her narrator’s vivid vulnerability and distinct way of cataloguing her world, Julisch weaves a story of remembrance that truly honors, rather than simply pities, a young woman’s loss. —CRAFT

There were forty-nine white roses in the arrangement nearest to me. I counted them twice. Someone at the florist wasn’t paying attention.

The front-row chairs were upholstered in dark red velvet, which was thinning at the edges. I rolled the threads between my thumb and middle finger because it was better than fidgeting. Grandmother hated fidgeting. Ruby sat to my left, her hand on my forearm. Resting there, the way the paperweight on my desk holds my sheets of scribbles. Ruby had been with me since I was born. Mom told me once that hiring Ruby was the best decision she ever made, even better than marrying Dad. She said this while Dad was standing there. He laughed the way he always did, face animated, whole body shaking. Dad said Mom balanced him, and I tipped the scale into happy. He was always saying things like that. I have a diary of Dadisms.

I watched the audience. Many were crying. Grandmother sat in the front row too, but she was surrounded by friends who had managed to position themselves around her like Atlas holding up the sky. Some people were good at holding others up. Ruby was like that.

After the service, people lined up to offer their condolences. Ruby had prepped me in the car: They’ll say kind things; say thank you. They’ll touch you, don’t pull away. She’d said it the way she said everything important to me—clear, without extra words. Her voice, the cadence of Mom’s meditation teacher.

The first woman was from Mom’s Pilates class. She pressed both of my hands between hers and said, “I know just how you feel.”

Ruby squeezed my arm. That was our signal for me to be quiet, but the words were already on their way out. “Do you? Did you have a funeral service for your parents?”

The woman’s face did the thing faces do when I’d said something wrong—her mouth opened to that oh sound, eyes wide, her entire expression rearranging itself like misfiled books being reshelved in a rush. Ruby’s face morphed into an asymmetric half smile. “Thank you for your condolences,” she said. The woman turned away. Ruby leaned in. “Go to your happy place,” she whispered.

My happy place was the library in our house. It had two thousand, six hundred and fourteen books, the last time I counted, which was yesterday. Mom used to read in the library every night after dinner, one leg folded beneath her on Dad’s old brown bachelor-days leather chair. Sometimes I’d sit on the floor near her feet; other times I’d organize the shelves by genre and publication date while she read. We didn’t need to talk. Mom understood that being near someone and being silent with them weren’t opposites. We banned Dad during reading hour because he kept talking, but we gave him a special Dad Hour. He could chatter and banter as much as he wanted.

The next person stepped up. A tall man in a gray suit. He smelled like black pepper and lavender. “Your parents were wonderful people, and your dad… He was the best.” I agreed, so I said, “Yes, they were, and he was.” Ruby’s hand softened on my arm. I’d gotten that one right.

Then came a woman I didn’t recognize. She was crying before she reached me, and when she tried to speak, nothing came out. She stood there, mouth working, hands shaking. I reached out and held her wrist. Grandmother murmured, “Sweetheart.” She only called me that when I behaved as she expected.

A man with a beard said, “They’re in a better place.” I almost asked where. If there was a place better than our library, I wanted to know about it. But Ruby shifted her weight and coughed slightly—the other signal, the one before the squeeze—so I said, “Thank you.”

Then Mom’s colleague from the university said, “She talked about you all the time,” and I said, “About what, specifically?” The colleague gave me the look. I have a taxonomy for looks. This was the Oh Lord, help this child look. But then she said, “She said books made you happy.”

“Ruby, does this mean I get Mom’s books? Is the library mine now? Can I sort it today?”

Ruby nodded and put a finger to her lips. The colleague turned away.

The line kept going, but I’d already left. Not physically. Ruby would have noticed. In my mind, I was standing in the library, sorting Mom’s collection, moving her favorites so they were the first you saw when you walked in. Eleven Toni Morrisons, seven George Eliots, three Diana Wynne Joneses, and The Complete Calvin and Hobbes—that was more mine than hers. I added her highlighted copy of The Book of Joy. She’d read it so many times the spine was broken.

Someone else was speaking. I heard their voice the way I heard people in noise-canceling mode—present but backgrounded. Ruby responded. She always knew when I was gone. I shelved the last book in my mind. Then I went to Dad’s old chair and sat on the floor beside it. The chair was empty, but that wasn’t new. What was new was that it would stay empty. That thought sat in my head like a book I wasn’t ready to open.

Ruby’s hand came back to my arm.

“You okay?”

“Forty-nine, eleven, seven, three,” I said.

She didn’t ask what I meant. She never did.

CJ JULISCH is a Swiss and African-American writer based in Zürich. She holds an MFA from Boston University, and her fiction has appeared in Vestal Review. She was shortlisted for the 2025 CRAFT Dialogue Prize and is at work on her first collection of short stories.