"Mother's Asterales" by Yuelian Wang: November 2025 3rd Place

Aki paused at her father’s darkened room. November’s advent calendar was cut open, the paper torn with days still left. The chocolates were long gone, eaten in absent-minded hunger.

The pressed flowers taped on the door were a sickly yellow.

She stopped looking.

Mother had loved chrysanthemums.

The cake was cold. The incense had narrowed to a thread of bitter smoke.

Aki put on her jacket. It was no warmer. She didn’t remember leaving, only the door clicking shut. The streets were swollen with bright, artificial plastic. People smiled at the early snow withering the trees.

She felt nothing but the ice settling in her chest.

Her body refused to turn back, even as each passerby became hundreds more, their faces pale and unseeing in her dull eyes.

What would Mother do?

No one looked. No different from those who let the girl die selling matches.

Time slowed.

A sliver of space cracked from within the crowd.

And she stumbled through, falling hard to her knees.

It was quieter here. She was in a garden of sorts, covered in sleet pretending to be snow. Before her, a pale stone was staked into the ground, chrysanthemums carved into marble, a pot of real ones dead beside it.

They should've lasted through November.

But where was this November, when the girl selling matches was no more than a corpse in the snow, stepped over and ignored?

…

It didn’t matter to them.

Her tears became ice before they ever hit the ground.

And she was home again, clutching her stupid jacket. Hands trembling, she ran to her chrysanthemums, sobbing to find them alive.

“Aki?”

She turned to see her father, his hand empty without his wedding ring.

For a moment, she met his eyes. Then she looked away, through the glass, at the Christmas lights, at the society that forgot Armistice.

Like Father forgot Mother.

A floor is meant to be stepped on with disregard. A corpse is something to move on from.

Am I so selfish?

She picked up the glass pot.

“...Aki?”

“Mother will still want chrysanthemums on her birthday.” …

Even if I’m only sending them to die.