Imagery in Ink | Piece #3: “Maid of Honor” by Caroline Funk

For my series, I chose to focus on striking or impactful imagery, both present in the work and imagined, in three of the fiction pieces selected for this issue of Windmill.

Piece #3: “Maid of Honor” by Caroline Funk

“Maid of Honor” is another story rife with imagery, as the narrator recounts days long past with her now-married friend: Lily’s dark, curly hair; a white pillowcase as a wedding veil; mint leaves stuck inside the plastic straw of a mojito; bare feet in the grass; blue flowers decorating a wedding cake. In the end, I chose to draw a slice of Lily’s wedding cake that she eats with Jane and the whiskey that they reference having stolen in high school to drink outside their junior prom. This merges old and new—the wedding cake as a symbol of Lily’s relationship with her husband and the whiskey as a symbol of Lily and Jane’s relationship—as the story does. The choice to draw Jack Daniel’s specifically was a more personal one—in class, we discussed where we thought this story took place, and I realized that I had imagined, as I read it, a very traditionally Southern wedding, as most of the weddings I’ve been to have been for my Southern extended family, many of whom are from Tennessee. Therefore—Tennessee whiskey.