TOMORROW, WE'RE GOING TO BE STARDUST

Día De Muertos is supposed to be a celebration. When the dead return home, the day is filled with festivals, family, home-cooked food, and the bright smell of marigolds.   But Miguel O’Hara has no family, is too miserable to leave the apartment, and all the marigolds have gone extinct.   They’ve been extinct since 2095, actually. How hadn’t he known? That should've been something he'd figured out sooner, right? But no, he finds out a week before the day itself while he’s trying to make Gabriella’s ofrenda.   What does his beloved baby girl, who he would’ve given the world a thousand times over, get instead? Paper flowers.   Paper flowers instead of real ones, possessions that represented her instead of properly being hers, a half-done altar that was done in a manic, grief-fueled haze.   It’s paltry. Miguel knows it is. But it’s all he can give, and by God, he hates it. He tried to make it up in home-made pan de muerto and fresh fruit and her favorite dinners, in the carefully arranged papel picado garlands, in finding actual copal to burn… but it’s not enough. It could never be enough.