The Young Mrs. Gaines

There is a woman laying on a park bench that has been uprooted and placed on a balcony. She smokes and blows rings into the air above her. Her body shivers and shakes despite the warmth of the night. Her eyes, when they open, seem unable to focus. She keeps eyeing the empty armchair across the space from her.

"You've gotta go now Neal. You gotta leave me. Gotta go."

The silloutte of a man is shown in the armchair, but he makes no responce. The woman begins to weep.

The widow is at the grave. She wears textured black in the dead of winter. Thick smoke escapes thru her veil. She is the dark one, so internally broken by her loss that she chooses not to grieve at all. To the outsider, her husband's untimely death is meaningless to her, even to the point of arousing small-town suspicion.
When she is alone, however, she is the outward expression of pain. What she does not show publicly, she privately boarders on indulgence. She will wear black for the rest of her life. She cannot bear to remove her wedding band. This widow hasn't changed the sheets on her bed, she still lays there breathing in her husband's lingering scent. She takes small sips from the glass of water he left next to the bed. Some days she does nothing at all but lay in bed, wrapped in her dead husband's memory.