Nick Hilbourn

The Wedding

The quiet only ceased with the soft whisper of Lillian to Elliot. Her veil, a web of snowflakes falling before her eyes, shielded her face so she spoke through a frosty window to the cool winter blues and whites bruising on his cheeks.
“I think you should talk…to her,” she said.
Elliot glanced around the church at the stupefied congregation of family members and friends, heads on strings drawn to the small, lanky marionette figure in front of the door. His father stood beside the priest (using Eliot and his troupe of groomsmen as a barricade). He leaned forward and placed his hand on Eliot’s back, saying nothing for several seconds and then forced words through his lips with great effort.
“She’s right,” he said. “You should be the one.”
Eliot thought of asking his father and Lilian what it is he should say. People were turning to him now. They wanted an explanation, a word or two. Utterly perplexed, Elliot fought against the emotion surging up his body. Something tugged on his eyes, pain sliced a line from cornea to cornea along the back of his head. Everyone expected…something.
He stepped from the altar on to the aisle. Hands by his side, he had no staff or beard, but he was Moses walking the waters of stunned eyes gazing from either side of a frozen river of suits, ties and sun dresses. If he hadn’t been so nervous, he would have laughed at the movement of faces as he passed. It was an anti-wedding: the groom walking away from the bride. He was slow, but steady. Nothing could stop his movement. He was a natural phenomenon now as rigidly fluid as the cycles of the moon. His eyes weaved from side-to-side, never stopping on a single person, but, at some point, something forced him to look ahead, to look to the shadow at the end of the church. When he tried to look away his shoulders and legs became too rigid too move. Not wanting to stand still, he grudgingly agreed to glance toward the shadow hunkering in front of the large wooden doors of the church.
From the altar, she had been an echo of light bouncing off the stained glass windows. Her shadow resembled a puppet from the distant gaze of those standing with the priest, but once Elliot drew closer he saw the stringed shadow absorbing colors, soaking up shape from the swinging lamps overhead and the pins and needles of sunlight sneaking through an opening left by the large wooden doors not quite closed. For Elliot, there was a green, a black, a gray, a white, a purple. She was hideous once light embraced her. The red dress they had put on her was now a dead pink, as flat as carnations crushed for decades in the folds of a book. The fabric starved for sunlight yet unable to feast, still smattered with threads and clumps of soil and mud.
Eliot glanced back to the altar, hoping to receive some type of encouragement but faces disappeared in a curtain of white; Lillian, his father and the groomsmen were faint outlines shuffling back and forth, foot to foot, waiting for him to say something and dissolve the entire situation. He knew if he could make it disappear, then everyone present would forget about the trouble entirely. It was something ingrained in him, ingrained in all of them: to forget. At least, that was his hope. That everyone would forget, that everything would return to normal. He looked to the congregation for support, but they were opaque splotches of orange, pink, brown, white and black. It wasn’t distance; some of them were a few feet away. It was his eyes. They were clouding over, images drowning in them and when he tucked his chin against his chest and blocked his face from view to regain his vision - blinking his eyes over and over - a warm ticker-tape of tears zig-zagged over his cheeks. One stopped at his cheek, but was pushed by another to slide and rest in between the grooves of his lips. He slid his tongue along his mouth until the salty taste was gone.
As Elliot walked closer to the figure many people moved to the front of the church, mainly to escape from the smell, which was quite pungent. Elliot breathed through his mouth, but he could still taste the odor. It was moist and thick. Sweet but unbelievably foul: the sickeningly sugary perfume like chocolate too long in the sun. He wasn’t sure he would be able to go forward any farther, but the awkwardness of the situation quickly displaced the noisome scent.
When she came into full view, Elliot could see how quickly she had deteriorated in six months. The atmosphere had found her despite his best efforts. It had sniffed out her wooden cradle (though closed and hidden from the world), crawled through the earth, entered her through the nostrils, mouth, ear canal and melted her from the inside out until she was several clothes hangers swinging to and fro in a moth eaten closet of old clothes. Broomstick hair grew wild out of her head and her shoulders were lopsided so she stood like a badly built tree house. Her arms and legs faintly vacillated from side to side. Her hands were still, her calves unmoving, only her ankle and shoulders swayed from side-to-side. It seemed she was shuffling as well. The rigidity of her body, although it could have been fragility brought on by rigor mortis, seemed to tremble slightly, more so as he drew closer. And the closer Elliot got, the more sure he was that it was not the effects of bodily decomposition, but nervousness. She was scared.
It made him smile.
He opened his moth to say, “It’s okay”, but the words fell apart in his throat. He couldn’t say anything to her. Speaking to her was like speaking to a storm. There was nothing to do but watch and wait for it to be over.
Elliot ringed his hands through each other like he was squeezing the dampness from wet rags, wondering how he could make her leave without treating her roughly. He felt there was no other way but to guide her out, to touch her. Yet, he could not bring himself to do it. Her shoulders would be greasy and her body would be bulging with insects and invertebrates which were surely eating away her insides. The image was enough to make him want to vomit. The feeling subsided only when he saw a sparkle emanating from her right side. He bent down and saw a diamond ring on her finger. He smiled again, quickly widening it into an open-mouthed grin.
“You asked to be buried with it,” he said, not so much to her, but to himself as a reminder. He followed the sparkle up her slender arm bone wrapped hastily in sinew and the last vestiges of skin, gray and green like a moldy peach. He allowed himself to breathe out his nose. The smell was horrendous, yet he couldn’t get enough of it. It was her scent. It was very faint, masked almost entirely by the putrid odor of bodily humus, but it was there. An echo of an echo in the Grand Canyon, but it was there. He shook his head, imagining that what he was about to do next would look like to everyone. It would be shocking, but he couldn’t help himself. Leaning forward, he kissed her on the hard, sandpaper surface of her mouth. Her lips were gone, bone had seeped through skin and the nose was a nub protruding from her face, yet he wasn’t disgusted. She did not, could not return the kiss, but he felt a warmth shoot through his own body. Wiping away the oily residue from his mouth, he kneeled down and took her ringed hand. The congregation, already horrified by the kiss, now unhinged their jaws, rubbed their eyes, squeezed their palms against the heads – anything to block the image out or to add some sense of reality to a dream that had somehow snuck into the waking hours.
Nothing could be done.
Elliot rotated the ring on her finger until he found an engraving on its underside: “January 9”. He looked up at her, still smiling (unable to stop, in fact) and said, “That’s today.” It was the first time he had looked in her face for an extended period of time. She was expressionless. Hollow circles embraced kidney bean eyes that did not look but rather reflected the light of the room capturing it upside down with the distant glare of a pair of small camera lens. Yet, when Elliot touched her hand, she cupped it in between her two palms, a soft wet snap as she did so. Some in the congregation moaned painfully when the sound of the snap spread to them. Elliot’s hand in between hers, the palms rubbed back and forth. The ring dragged across his palm. Elliot looked into her eyes and saw his reflection.
“What is it?” he asked and felt the hands rubbing faster and faster, a rough gurgle rising in her throat. The smooth top of the ring feeling warm and comforting at first, but she continued doing it for several minutes. Elliot tried to stop the rubbing with his free hand, but she would not or could not stop. The ring dug into his palm and Elliot groaned. “Stop,” he said. “Stop, please…” She seemed unable to hear him and his voice grew louder and louder and louder. “Stop…stop….” Her eyes did not look at him, her hands did not stop rubbing and Elliot, finally, had enough.
“Anna! Stop!” he yelled and jerked his palm from between her two hands. Simultaneously, there was another wet snap, much louder, and the two hands fell to the floor. Elliot tripped over his feet and fell to his back, crawling backward, his eyes locked upon hers. He rubbed his hands roughly against the floor, leaving a scar of dark colors on the church floor. He gripped the side of a pew and pulled himself to his feet. “Out!” He yelled. “Out!” Each time he yelled, his eyes clouded and moistened until a caul of tears dripped from his eyes and dampened his face. His voice broke and his fingers trembled. He stomped toward her, arm outstretched, not angry but feigning so in order to continue moving with such force. With quick pushes he edged her closer to the door. She was unwilling to move or couldn’t move. It was unclear to him which was which. Yet, when she reached the large doors at the end of the church, he opened one of them and sent her flying over the front steps and onto the ground with a hardy shove. Her body landed with a wet thump and she was motionless. He wiped his hands against the door, ran a sleeve across his face and walked back to the altar, shaking her presence from his body as he did so.
His father and groomsmen watched him incredulously, brows furrowed, hands crossed defensively over their chests. Lillian was crying. Softly, attempting to keep it quiet, but the acoustics of the church picked up her low weeping and carried it up to the very top of the church and rained it down on the congregation.
“What?” he asked, taking her hand and pressing it against his chest. “What is it?” She wouldn’t answer him. He looked to his father and groomsmen and they said nothing. “Lillian, please, what is it?”
“Oh…Elliot…” she said, her words in short staccato breaths.
“What?” Elliot said, nearly yelling. Lillian took her hand from Elliot’s chest, removed her veil and dropped it to the floor.
“You’re still married.”