Conrad Aiken’s “Strange Moonlight” (1925) is a moody picnic story. It’s an elegy on death seen through the eyes of an unnamed young boy, somewhere between nine and eleven years old, who is bewildering affected by the death of his dear friend Caroline Lee. *
To shake the boy’s morbid mood, the father and mother decide to go on a picnic instead at Tybee Island Beach just before visiting Caroline Lee’s grave. The food, prepared by Selena, the African American cook, is “elaborately” packed into a wicker basket: sugar-sandwiches, pots of deviled ham, cookies, hard-boiled eggs, and a hundred other things; piles of beautiful sandwiches were exquisitely folded up in shining clean napkins.” 
The ploy works, but the picnic is a, at best, a mixture of joy, happiness, “The sunlight came down heavily like sheets of solid brass, and they could feel the heat of the sand on their cheeks. Then, at last, they came out onto the enormous white dazzling beach with its millions of shells, its black and white striped lighthouse, and the long, long sea, indolently blue, spreading out slow and soft lines of foam and making an interminable rushing murmur like trees in the wind. He felt instantly a desire, in all this space and light to run for miles and miles.”
At home that night, the boy, still bewildered, looks at the moonlight in the night sky and realizes that Caroline Lee is dead, and more importantly, that he is alive.
Ordinary picnic: Strange moonlight.
*Probably an allusion to Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabelle Lee.” When Aiken was the same age as the boy in “Strange Moonlight,” his father murdered his mother and committed suicide. Aiken, on an upper floor of the house, heard the gun gunshots
See Conrad Aiken. “Strange Moonlight.” In Bring! Bring! and Other Stories. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. There is a separate entry for Sugar Sandwiches.