As the mourners disperse after the funeral, I step to the side of the dirt lane and bow my head in respect, letting them pass. Afterwards, there’s just the interrists crouching by the headstone, the more wizened of the two instructing the fresh face on how to install a box of cremains. The press of a button, a panel of twitchy grass slides away, and a dark space gapes beneath, hungry for the box.
“Believe it or not, Jaff, used to be the dead would go into real earth—you know?—like the actual ground, not an eternity compartment, and used to be there’d be real birds on the wing overhead.”
“Boy, real birds, that’d be swell.”
I start to approach them, waiting for a natural opening to ask for directions.
“Don’t know about that,” the old guy counters. “Real birds mean real bird shit and real worms for the real birds to gobble up, and who in the Good Lord’s name wants to see real worms in the holoyard, worms to remind them of worm food, worm food, that’s you and me, pal, down the road.” He cackles, and the younger fellow joins in with a hollow, forced laugh.
“Excuse me!” I call out, when suddenly a holo springs to life in the form of a young girl with dark curls and a bright yellow dress.
“Why, hello sir, what a glorious day it is, wouldn’t you say?”
The two interrers look toward us, with sharp, critical eyes, then seem to gaze beyond us, at the impressive castle of clouds piling up on the horizon, maybe. I make my sheepish apology, stepping back towards the center of the lane and begin to move on. The girl shrinks back into her headstone, with a pleading look that makes my heart ache.
Presently, the men turn back to their work, and I can just make out the old one saying, “Enter the deceased’s ID tag, then calibrate the activation sensitivity. Much good as it’ll do, the way they go off at a whisper of simulated wind.”
I forget sometimes about using one’s library voice in the holoyard and being careful not to spring other people’s holos, for every activation produces a change in the holographic entity, however slight and imperceptible.
Never mind, I’ll find my way on my own.
It always smells like May in the holoyard. Frozen at dawn, a warm touch on the breeze, a glorious place to lose one’s way. The road wends along ponds and gardens, over hills and under stone bridges, and presently across the way, I spot a pagoda.
A familiar sight at last.
I redouble my pace and am soon mounting the slope toward Katerina’s plot. There is the bouquet of baby’s breath I keyed in the last time I came, hundreds of Sundays ago.
“We need a refresher. Don’t we, Kat? Forget-me-nots? Spider lilies?” I say, stopping by her section’s console. “No, no, no. The star magnolia.” I tap a few keys, and the flowers before her headstone metamorphose as I approach and summon up my wife.
It is not as she looked when we spoke our parting words through a confusion of tubes and breathing masks in a sterilized room ten years ago. Not that gray wasted dirge. Extrapolated from a lifetime of photos and videos and brain scans contributed by everyone who cared for her, this is a dance, a waltz, Katerina at her freshest, dressed in her unfussy bridal gown.
“Thank you for the lovely flowers,” she says.
“You’re welcome, darling. I was afraid you might not remember the tree out front.”
“I’ll never forget. Magnolia stellata.”
“Late-winter blooms, the first sign of spring.”
“The background of fourteen of our family portraits.”
“And when the wind picked up, it would rain flower petals.”
“And you would complain about having to rake in the spring. We should have invested in a yard bot.”
Although should and would are impressive feats for a holo, I keep attempting to pry out of her a sprig of poetry, a non-factual, evocative phrase, but nothing comes. Kat used to sing spontaneous snatches of classical music. It was not something you asked of her, but rather how she saw fit to fill in the silent moments. You heard her humming and would never think to question why; it was simply something she did.
You pay a fortune for these things, but of course they amount to nothing but a reopening of the wound.
She is, however, able to read my disappointment, and her algorithms force a topic shift.
“Tell me about the children.”
I sigh. “I rarely hear from them. Ever since that time I dropped Mora, Raine won’t have me at the house.”
The fact that I had dropped her grandson does not faze her.
“You should try drinking less.”
I study her as she speaks, noticing further flaws: the unnatural prosody, the slight lag between lip movement and sound. You can tell there is no breath humming through those windpipes, no empathetic spark driving her responses. This is to the bona-fide Katerina what an auto-story prog is to the Bard of Avon.
“This topic troubles you, too.” Katerina’s face undergoes a subtle change, and her tone brightens. “Let’s talk about books. I’m currently reading The House of the—”
“No one reads books anymore,” I say, not wanting to be reminded of the text that had rested beside her hospital bed, the one she would die before finishing.
Her mouth twitches. “That’s unfortunate. Reading is a fruitful and endlessly pleasurable pastime.” This assurance feels encyclopedic.
“I’m afraid I must be off, dear.”
“So soon? But you just arrived.”
“How about a parting kiss for your groom?”
I lean forward, eyes closed, trying to recapture the pleasurable heat between our lips, but memory, for all its electrochemical composition, lacks electricity.
As I step away, I accidentally steer through the sensor range of the adjacent plot, and another holo leaps into being.
“Hello to you, sir,” a familiar voice says.
I almost keep walking without turning around, but good manners are a difficult habit to break.
“My mistake,” I say, with a backward nod.
Then I gasp, for standing behind me, smiling his benevolent holo smile beside the vanishing perversion of my wife, is none other than—myself.
Tim Boiteau lives in Michigan with his family. He is the author of the novel The Nilwere, and his short fiction has appeared recently in Dread Mondays, Weird Tales to Haunt Your Reptilian Brain, Bath Flash Fiction Vol. 9, and Best of Carnage House Vol 2. He is a winner of a Writers of the Future award, as well as 50-Word Stories‘ Story of the Year.
Published 2/14/26