Elsewhere in town, someone else was receiving their own inheritance in a shallow cardboard box about two feet by four feet, and opening it with a friend.
"You're kidding," the companion deadpans. "Your aunt was named Dorian Gray? Like that story?"
"Her name was Doreen Gray, not Dorian Gray," the inheritor explains. "And she was my great aunt, not my aunt. And she married into the name Gray, it's not her fault she fell in love with a man named Everett Gray."
"Your great uncle?"
"Well, Doreen was the blood relation, she was my grandpa's sister, but yeah, Aunt Doreen and Uncle Everett were just always around when I was little, and I guess now that they're both gone, everyone in the family's been given something from their home before the estate sale."
The companion began staring daggers at the cardboard. "Open it, I want to see."
The inheritor rolled their eyes. "Fine." They dragged a pair of scissors across one end of the box and slid out the contents: a framed painting. "That's my Great Aunt Doreen."
"You're kidding," the friend gaped. "It's a literal picture of Doreen Gray."
"I wonder when she had this painted, it looks exactly like the last time I saw her."
"Do you want to hang it somewhere?"
"I kind of do, yeah. It might not stay up forever, but I feel like it should be up on a wall, at least for now."
And so the two went about hanging the picture of Doreen Gray on the wall of the inheritor's bedroom.
But who inherited this painting? And who is the friend? And what, if anything, does the painting signify?
