Years ago, during her husband’s funeral, the tea house woman felt freed from her marriage. She didn’t know it, but Sam had ordered doves to be released into the air, and it was a lovely, holy gesture, but when the clapping of their wings erupted all at once around them the tea house woman started and her hands went to her heart. Caught in that thought, she was ashamed. Today, as best as she can in the rain, and with Iris’s help, she will scatter her father’s ashes, which she is holding in her hands in an antique urn covered in dark patchwork oxhides. Around her neck is her mother’s silver locket. Within, a coiled braid made from a lock of her mother’s hair, a lock of her father’s, and a lock of her own from the day she was born. It looks like a hairy shell, and she wears it because she is comforted by the idea that a strange but beautiful creature might be cocooned inside, so close to her heart. The rain begins to thin, then stops, and she follows Iris blindly, giving herself over to the other woman’s lead. The ground becomes sand and the sand becomes sea, and as it rises over their waists the tea house woman removes the lid from the urn. Behind them, silhouetting Iris, the faintest rainbow forms, shimmers, then fades as the sun is lost to streaks of red dark sky.