Confetti and a Coffin

Koll Strand sat inside a small gymnasium on a picnic table bench, sorting indiscriminately through a small pile of confetti in his left palm, breathing shallow breaths and smiling, halfway, to himself and to his hand.

Around him, on her feet, moved a woman from Colombia with a vacuum, a woman named Eva who had no idea that the man whose feet raised up to avoid her cleaning would die, one way or another, sometime within the next twelve weeks. She didn't know but he did.

The party—that's how he referred to it, regardless of the rather morbid alternatives that his friends had assigned to it or to themselves, such as "The Death Bash" or "The Coffin Cast"—would take place the following day, the afternoon and the evening and all the night until light appeared in the sky, probably around 5 a.m. Those were the rules, so to speak. There weren't many. People could bring anything they wanted, and with regard to their goodbyes, they could speak out loud in a toast or quietly to Koll himself. Koll preferred more laughter than crying, and he told his invitees the same, but that wasn't a rule, just a preference. He would be gentle.

...