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…
Many of my stories begin as puzzles. An idea trips me up, lodges in my brain, and won’t leave until I find the narrator who can carry it. Once the narrator takes over, I try to stay out of the way.
This story began as a memory. I was ten years old, standing in the receiving line at my grandmother’s funeral, listening to people say things they meant but didn’t really mean. I know just how you feel. They’re in a better place. Each phrase sounded both well-intentioned and contradictory. What would happen, I wondered, if people said what they were actually thinking in that receiving line.
And so, the receiving line became the story’s framework, but it also became the craft problem. How do you make five or six nearly identical interactions feel like progression rather than cataloging? In flash, repetition is usually something you’re told to cut. But repetition with variation is something the form offers. Then the question was: What would change between encounters, and where would the pressure build?
The answer came via the narrator. At first, she was just an observer, but I quickly realized that the story needed someone who not only notices and catalogs everything, but also isn’t quite adept at communicating in a compressed, emotional moment. Once that was worked out, it became obvious that each encounter in the receiving line should reveal a different facet of her relationship to people and language. The Pilates woman gets the unfiltered response. The tall man gets the rehearsed one—and she knows she’s gotten it right, which tells us she’s keeping score. The crying woman gets silence, and that silence is the most revealing moment, because for once, the narrator isn’t failing at communication. The bearded man gets the nearly-spoken question she manages to hold back. And the colleague gets the pivot: She said books made you happy.
That pivot was the hardest part of the revision. The narrator needed a reason to leave the receiving line and enter the library, but I didn’t want the transition to feel like escape. It needed to be a natural extension of her processing. In earlier drafts, she simply drifted into the library on her own, but that felt arbitrary, and the reader couldn’t follow her there because they were still in the line. The colleague’s line solved it. It gave the narrator permission to go where she is most at home, and it gave the reader a bridge. Once she’s in the library, the piece shifts to her interiority, and the counting, which has been beneath the surface since the roses, becomes her primary means of expressing what she cannot put into words. She’s translating her loss into language she trusts.
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.
