dr-neurotic

[dr-neurotic]

Apple of my Eye

Fred tapped his eyelid, "Just about ninety-five percent. Getting it removed on Sunday," he said to Ms. Julie and her daughter Raquel.

Raquel unclasped her hand from her mother and stepped forward to assess the damage. She recoiled, squealing.

“It’s so gross!”

He laughed. “Good thing the good people at St. Jude are gonna take it out for me.”

The milky stain of infection blotted out his left pupil, rendering him blind in the eye. He turned his whole head from the rosebush he was watering and winked with great emphasis, like he was sharing a secret with the little girl.

"Can we visit Mr. Fredrick in the hospital?" she asked, tugging at her mother's shirt.

"Sure honey."

He shook his head, feigning disappointment. “Didn’t I tell you to call me Fred? Ah, before you go. A treat for the fair lady.” He handed her a butterscotch. “And a hug for good luck?”

Raquel looked up and was swallowed up by Fred’s oversized sweater.

“Remember, St. Jude.”

Fred bent down to pick up the garden hose. His eyes followed his neighbors enter their home. He exhaled and chuckled to himself. His good eye followed them through the window, but the hose only stretched so far. Fred jerked forward and almost fell.

Over the next few hours, Fred took calls from friends checking in before the big day.

He considered calling his daughter. Her voice sounded just like Christa’s—his deceased wife. Then he considered calling his ex-wife. The one still living. Neither apparently understood the value of family. He had done wrong in the past, but he was possessed by the spirit of grief. He had been baptized again after they all separated. He attended church regularly like she’d wanted. Stopped drinking, mostly. Just a beer before bed to stave off the demons. Nothing he did seemed enough to earn redemption in their eyes. Fifteen years passed since they went no contact.

Saturday night, Fred prepared his strength for the coming endeavor.

He strung the blackout curtains.  The computer prompted authorization to the partitioned hard drive. Fred input his 26-character password. A giddy sense of fear coursed through him where hunger sat in his stomach. His secret club unfolded on the screen in front of him.

The surgery would mean a temporary leave from the forum. No new content this month, it seemed. His fans seemed bummed, but the admins allowed it. Fred was, after all, a curator of sorts.

Through the quiet hours of the night, he browsed the forum. His eyes flitted from left to right. The escapades of his faceless friends granted him courage. Their content, a little luck before he went.

At eight, after the sun had long disappeared, he heard a knock at the door. He jolted and stood straight up. He smashed the power button down until the power drained from the screen. He crept to the door in the dark.

 Good eye against the peephole and breath so light as to appear invisible, he scanned the porch. The streetlight set Raquel’s silhouette ablaze. Fred sighed. He slumped against the door then pulled it open.

“Mom said send these over.” She held out a basket of cookies.

Though the pre-surgery checklist required a period of fasting, he bit off one of them.

He flashed a chocolate-stained smile. “You’re very mature. These are amazing. Thank your mommy for me, little lady.”

“Okay.”

Fred waved her off and watched her leave. And when she passed the threshold of the sidewalk, he stepped onto the porch and watched her enter her home. Then he pinched himself and returned inside.

In the morning, he attended his pre-surgery orientation. He sat on a black chair in the waiting room, skimming over the informational packet. He wondered if Raquel would stop by. What a sweet girl. Hopefully the cookie wouldn’t affect his surgery.

The surgery… it hadn’t fully settled for him that he was about to lose a full eye. The dull pain remained in the periphery of his sense. Nerves made him shake with fear. But if it wasn’t removed, the infection could spread, propagate to the other eye or worse, to his brain.

A nurse led him to the showers. The cold found its way into his bones. It didn’t leave his skull as he draped the hospital gown over his shoulders and tied the string behind his back. The doctor returned.

"Left eye?”

“Right,” he agreed.

His attending scribe nodded and jotted a note.

“If you’ll follow me to the operating room."

“I’m a little anxious, doc,” he said.

The doctor didn’t change paths. “It happens. You should try to take deep breaths. If you followed the checklist all the way down, you will be fine. No worries. You won’t even be awake to feel it.”

“I won’t talk aloud… not like those wisdom teeth removals right?”

The doctor turned and smiled. “I think that’s enough internet. Doesn’t happen so dramatically in real life.”

Fred lay on the operating table. A hairnet slid around the circumference of his skull. Doctors hovered above him. Masked and suited to the eyes, like aliens probing him for information. He had none to give.

A blood pressure cuff relayed his vitals to a monitor. Fred couldn’t make out the meaning of the numbers.

“Alright, I’m gonna have you count backwards, from ten down.”

“10, 9, 8...” Jameson felt his eyes close. 7, 6, 5, he thought, but no sound came out.

A rough wad circled his eye, smearing a cold liquid. 4, 3, 2, 1… he continued to count, awaiting sleep. Sleep did not take him there.

The fingers hesitated then continued to circle his right eye. He waited for the sensation to move to his left.

A thin metal rod pulled his eyelids back. Blue light pierced through.

The doctor waved a needle above his eye. The right, not the left. Panic fired up his brain. His vitals beeped steadily.

STOP! WRONG EYE! STOP! He tried wiggling his toes to regain some control, but nothing was working. He cursed and prayed in his mind. He was a good churchman. He prayed for the doctor who had been working for fifty hours straight to see that the left eye needed removal, not the right. Please not the right. He needed that one.

A needle slipped through the surface and delivered a payload that felt like napalm in his skull. Searing burning pain. Fred tried to pull all his strength into leaping from the operating table.

Scissors snipped all the way around. Blunt cuts which could be felt, but the pain only came as an echo. Each second passed slowly for Fred to note every torturous tug and cut. Hooks pulled the ocular muscles , and the sphere of his right eye was leveraged past the socket. More cuts.

Something slipped under the lid, under the globe. The white faded in and out. Fred was pulled back into consciousness. He maintained his panic, screaming only with his mind and praying with the fervor of a priest.

A pressure released. The light faded entirely, but Fred was still there.

A force rummaged in the hole, positing the marble-like implant. Only when the surgery was complete Fred was allowed rest. He fell into slumber.

He woke an hour later. He could not see. Not from his left, and certainly not from his right. He felt as though he was sitting up, but the sense betrayed him.

“I was awake,” he muttered to himself. “Wrong eye…”

“Fred, how are you feeling?” asked the doctor.

“I can’t see…”

Delirium and brain fog, as well as a load of morphine, had cauterized his ability to think. “My eye… My eye….”

The doctor manually opened Fred’s left eye to see the stain still ingrained deep inside.

[dr-neurotic]

New year's at Levi's

As the credits rolled on the old year, Levi refreshed his texts. The clock read 11:40. Twenty minutes until the year would change and the promise of a better life would beat in his heavy heart.

Justin and Amy sat on the L couch, drinking from sparkling juice containers. Clarice hadn't responded to his invite. Another failed talking stage. Levi chewed his cheek.

"You missed it!" said Justin. "Come sit and watch. Whoever comes will come!"

"Yeah, no problem," Levi said, not looking up from his phone. "Just waiting for Alex."

This was a lie, but there was some truth to it. The others had used the snow warning as an excuse to miss his new year’s party, but Alex hadn't even opened the message. He'd worried Levi all week. No time to hang out, apparently. He didn't like dragging him if he didn't feel like it, but maybe he should have this time. He hoped it wasn't another depressive episode.

All year he pined for Clarice. They were going to watch some arthouse movie last week but apparently some last-minute work thing came up. He sighed and joined Justin and Amy on the couch. A comfortable distance between him and the couple, who laughed among themselves.

Levi poured himself a cup of sparkling apple juice. He rubbed his freezing feet on the shag carpet.

"Any resolutions for next year?"

"Maybe get married," joked Amy, slapping Justin's thigh.

"She's so funny," he said. "Maybe I'll try to lose some of this weight finally. Amy says we should become gym rats. You?"

Levi shrugged. "Nothing special. Go back to school. Get a new car." Fall in love, he didn't say.

It was adorable how they sat so close that their hearts could touch, but the sight made his heart feel weak. He had to pinch himself. His turn would come soon.

A headlight brushed against the curtains and blinds and into his living room. Could that be her?

He jumped out and pulled two blinds apart. The car drove past, slow as not to slip on the growing field of ice.

Levi pulled his phone out of his jeans. Still nothing from Clarice. He had hoped that maybe she'd say what the heck and come down anyway, but didn't seem likely at this point. As he slipped his phone back in, he felt the buzz of an incoming message. Alex.

"Thank you for everything."

Levi's blood froze over, cold as the roads. Fingers cursed with Seattle brand rigor mortis, he managed to type out "plz wait, im omw," before dropping his phone.

Levi's face scrunched. He stifled a sob. A wave of exhaustion washed over him, threatening to knock him off his feet. He hopped to the front door while pulling his boots over his socks.

Justin watched, confused. "What's going on?"

"Alex," he muttered, like he was in a trance. Wind and snow stormed through the living room. Levi ran out into the snow. He clipped the curb and almost fell. Alex lived about a mile away. Levi's brain ran the calculations. One mile. In the foot of snow, he could run four miles an hour. It would take fifteen minutes. He tried not to think. Only run. His phone didn't buzz any longer. Not Alex. Not Clarice. He would not fall in love that year. He sprinted down the street, past flashing Christmas lights that his neighbors had been too lazy to take down. Streetlights seemed to go on forever, spinning circles on a sea of snow.

The frost burned Levi's lungs and flayed the skin on his face. Love... He wouldn't find love this year? Was he an idiot? Sure, he hadn't shared a kiss with Clarice like he'd hoped, but he knew love. He loved Alex. He knew it then. He ran and ran and ran, knees plowing snow. He loved Alex. He loved to sit in parking lots eating stale fries, loved playing games all night, watching sitcoms and... he needed Alex. Even if it was selfish. He had done everything, even if it was not with a girl he loved, it was with his best friend.

[dr-neurotic]

The girl who loved Pudding

I first fell in love when the jello branded chocolate pudding crossed my lips and melted on my tongue. It was sixth grade. My parents never bought processed foods. They were a method of control. Eating them was akin to falling in line and eating the assigned slop. But that day, Marika had packed a second pudding that day. I dipped the edge of the white cafeteria spoon through the glossy surface and brought it to my mouth. The flavor instantly and permanently changed my brain’s neurochemistry. I shoveled another glob down the gullet. Before I knew it, I was eating Marika’s too. She and her friends watched, reveling in the sight.

“How could you never have tasted pudding?”

“How can you like that awful stuff?”

Their opinions melted away like the chocolate on my tongue. I was in a trance. My paradigm had been shifted. I became known as the girl who liked pudding.

Soon after chocolate was the vanilla flavor. Not too different, but a catalogued departure from chocolate. Eaten in my basement, crouching beside the washing machine. Stolen from the nearby Kroger. God forbid my parents find me eating something so horrible and American.

A daddy long legs crawled beside my hand. I wondered if its little brain would explode if it had a taste of nectar. I smeared its guts across the concrete floor. I didn’t think it deserved to try it. The beauty would be wasted on its feeble mind. Plus, if it liked it, it would go tell its friends, and I only had the one cup.

Vanilla is not a “blank flavor” but more of a mild sweetness, flowery, even. Unlike a popular sentiment, vanilla and chocolate are not opposites. They can compliment each other, too, though the actual mixed flavor took the neutral combination of both.

I licked the inside of the cup clean and dumped it into the neighbor’s trash can.

***

Party pudding. My father’s party for my graduation. His middle-aged friends brought glasses layered with chocolate truffle dust and bavarian cream. I skipped dinner for it. Eaten behind the kitchen counter as I tried to vacate before the toast.

I inhaled the substance and subsequently choked. I heaved the dust out of my system, all over my formal clothes and went at it again. I am told that it isn’t a pudding but a custard. Who defines a pudding? Who has the authority to say that this is not a pudding from the supple consistency, the way it coats the tongue from front to back?

Father says I embarrassed him. The pudding was worth it.

 Quite lovely, but not a pudding I would like to have daily, lest my sensible nature would fade. A noteworthy pudding.

***

Bread pudding, a barbeque for someone’s wedding. Perfect mesh of crispy edges and smooth pudding. Creamy insides. Starches that melted in the mouth, not unlike the first encounter with pudding. Paired well with meat.

Each step into the world of pudding makes me see how little I know. How would I have known that you can turn bread into pudding? I wondered if I were to blend the brisket if I would come upon a new kind of pudding.

Banana pudding for dessert. Given for free by a boy. A boy whose eyes looked like vanilla pudding topped with a blueberry. I could marry a boy who looked at me like that.

***

Haleem at a friend’s house. Given by her mother as we studied for our Intro to Anatomy Exam. A meaty porridge. What I might have thought the brisket pudding could taste like. Hints of lemon, cilantro. Bits of bone, but I didn’t mind, the texture and mouthfeel were interesting, a departure from the puddings I’ve had regularly.

But still a pudding. Chunky—still smooth on its way down. I feel ashamed for not knowing about this dish before, but it’s also exciting. I think of all the puddings I have yet to try, puddings of different cultures that have persisted for eons. Those folks would have felt the same as I have now.

This pudding is said to be favored by all classes. Rich and poor alike have spooned this dish up and enjoyed. I have the image of soldiers eating a milder version, finding this to be the tastiest thing in the meal pack. Or peasants around a community pot. Rich men at a dinner with porcelain bowls.

***

Crème Brulee, bought by my boyfriend at Ocean Prime. Sweet, opulent. A sense of longing. A thin crust of broiled sugars with a sea of custard beneath. Doesn’t quite leave me full, but as I could not be satisfied with their given portion.

He wants me to be more present. He says I’m being distant. He wants me to like his friends more. They still call me pudding girl. I don’t like that he called me here with such a nice pudding so I can’t blame him.

I can and will.

For most of the conversation, I am not listening. I spoon small quantities of the brulee into my mouth and keep my eyes focused on the planetoid surface. He pulled out a gift bag. He’d bought me a blender. Cheeky joke, but I will use it to great effects. I’ve been meaning to make puddings at home. Permutations of all kinds are open when thrown into the blender compared to the shallow pools of restaurant menus.

***

Making new puddings.

 smoothie bowls,

red velvet,

peanut butter,

mousse,

custards,

porridge,

meat

etc

etc

etc

***

I pour everything into the blender. Eating solids feels wrong now. I would not deprive my new palette from the luxurious swirling taste of pudding. Why subject myself to anything less?

Moldy cream cheese whipped. For my boyfriend. I am curious as well. Tastes fine.

What is a pudding? People have eaten soft foods yes but soft to the point of pudding is a luxury. To eat it in so much quantity, I feel that I have a unique perspective on the matter. If I were to put it into words, it’s like the luxury has gone so far that I feel a carnal pleasure from eating it. It’s what my genetic ancestors did slurping the brains out of lesser animals.

They felt no shame. It was right because that’s the natural order. No social constructs, no clothes. No stupid fights. Eat and live. A pure way to live. I feel the instinct in the base of my skull where I’d left it. I have engaged in the past, and the pleasure had been ecstatic. Back when I’d taken Marika’s pudding, there was a lapse where I lapped the pudding until my brain boiled. Most probably the best feeling in the world that anyone has ever experienced post civilization. I want that feeling. I’d been craving it my whole life.

***

My boyfriend and I argued on the way home from his parents. He called me a pudding girl. I hate him. He reminds me of my father the way he tells me what to do. He’d gotten me a blender. An expensive one. I owed him my attention for it, he says.

That feeling returned. The red flash of heat in my head. I needed something. And finally, I saw how to win that feeling.

The kitchen knife slid from the wooden block. I slashed wide, cutting through his jugular and his carotid artery. He gasped and tried to scream. I shoved the knife vertically, splitting his throat. He knocked over the counter contents on the way down. I held the blender in place. Foam and blood flowed from the wound. I wiped the marooning liquid with two fingers and brought it to my tongue. Metallic, but almost sweet. I bent down and pressed my tongue into the cut. Quite good.

My blender called to me.

With an ice cream scoop, I gouged out the eyes, careful to preserve the form. My soon to be former boyfriend’s foot twitched. He was just about done being alive. Those vanilla eyes of his bounced in the blender. I poured the mixture into his skull and mixed it up with a spoon. At the end of my self-control, I took a large spoonful.

“So that’s what you taste like.”

I’d heard that pudding in prison is not very good, so I will run. Freedom lived in my mouth. There is more pudding in the world to be had.

[dr-neurotic]

[dr-neurotic]

St. Elmo's Fire

Arcs of lightning flashed like a divine lantern across the Orion’s spiraling tusk, shocking first seat pilot Price up and out of his chair. The belts on his shoulders pulled him back into his chair. He heaved, and looked to the other two in the aircraft head.

“St. Elmo’s fire,” said Captain Eman chuckling softly. She blinked the lights from her eyes and kept the hurricane hunter plane on course.

Price pouted, “I knew that. Just on edge... Against all my years of piloting sense we’re going into the storm rather than against it. You know what I mean?”

“Been too long since I turned from turbulence. This on-the-job training is about to be a real paradigm-shift for you, Price.”

Flight engineer Bluford pulled the dinosaur head helmet off and put on a headset. “Wow, we’re already here? Should have woken me up.”

“Hands on deck, Blue. Our feet have been wet for hours.” said Eman. She felt the first real strain on the yoke. The plane bucked, but Eman’s grip and steering sense held steady. She rolled with the motion. Her eyes laser focused on the oncoming thicket of clouds.

“Dropsonde 1 going out,” said the loadmaster. A data collection buoy shot from Orion’s belly and disappeared into the cloud cover.

“Copy,” said Price. “Two hundred knots at forty thousand feet and climbing. Feels faster,” said Price. His thousands of hours flying for Continental felt like nothing in the face of this mission.

The navigator relayed the angle and current coordinates. Eighteen souls in their metal cage, diving into the now category five beast in the Atlantic. The feeling Price noted could never be shaken from a pilot’s mind. Eman did the best she could to transform that anxiety into excitement.

Bluford slapped the kermit sticker on his window. “Go time.” He stretched his fingers and pushed the lever further. Orion’s engines roared a little louder in response.

Eman and Price’s eyes flew across the dashboards, monitoring conditions and data while maintaining conditions. Though he was green, Eman trusted Price. Likewise, Eman was the closest thing to autopilot that Price had.

She bobbed with the plane’s increasing oscillation and grinned with her teeth. It was the greatest challenge as a pilot against the most destructive force of nature.

 “Breaching the eye wall in approximately ten minutes,” said the navigator.

“It’s about to get a whole lot worse in here,” said Eman. “Sit tight, team.”

Precipitation and lightning streaked across the windows, worsening by the second. Bluford lowered the speed incrementally. The plane floundered in all angles of pitch and yaw and roll. The two pilots and engineer worked together as if they’d flown for years, communicating in short bursts and adjusting on the fly. Eman made a hundred decisions a second. Time crawled as if the hurricane’s strength dilated time.

 

Then a particularly bad surge of wind slammed against the plane. Eman jerked to the side. She slipped past her seatbelt, slamming her head into the metal beside her seat. Price shouted something. Lightning flashed before her glazed eyes. Her lapse in consciousness lasted less than a fraction of a second when a thought crossed her mind.

How did I get here again? Ah… that’s right.

 

When she was a child, she entered the school science fair with a triptych about hurricane formation. A tupperware bowl etched with lines from all the lunches her father took to work and a box of food coloring. She would stir, and the the judges watched with swirling eyes. A drop of food coloring. Two. The blue bands spiraled in the pink bowl. Bands deepened until the mass of the hurricanes body clouded the center of the bowl.

The judges moved to the next table when a sound like an angel screaming pierced through the walls of the gymnasium. Eman covered her ears. Her mother muttered a prayer and dragged her by the elbow out the crowded doors. The wind shot up her jacket. Her mother took the bowl and the box.

The tornado siren continued to blare. Eman clutched the tri-board with both hands. Through a brief respite in the sound she heard the wind howling through the trees. Her board picked up enough drag to take the weight off her heels, lifting her an inch above the pavement.

She didn’t scream. Didn’t make a sound. Her mind swirled with a cocktail of emotions. Curiosity, anxiety, and awe. Awe that struck the fear of god in her heart.

Her mom yelped and brought her back to earth before her tiny body could take flight. The damage was done, though. And there she was, so many years later in a hurricane’s raging fist.

 

Bluford’s hand hovered above her shoulder when she snapped back into her mind.

Blood trickled down and onto her left eye. She wrestled against the rocking force to strap herself back down in her seat. Once she nested in the seat, she breathed deeply and gripped the yoke with both hands. The Orion’s frame groaned. Eman growled back.

A clambering of thunder, shouting crewmates, and enough hail to build a church from then the Orion burst through the eye wall.

All was still. All went quiet. The whimper of a memory of wind rushing past the plane. Lightning shattered the darkness again and again, lighting the mile high cloud cliffs of white like rogue waves on white waters. A rather immense smattering of ink in the bowl.

Eman shivered. This wasn’t home. They were eighteen fleshy bodies forging through a hostile planet’s best attempts to kill them. Ants in a storm drain. She looked at the other two in the cockpit, and they must have felt it too. The fear of god.

She stared at the blood on her sleeve and turned off her mic. As her mother did, she prayed. For safety and because there was no other way she could think of to categorize the feeling in her chest. The remergence of her sense of scale. The volume of lightning could have been fooled you into thinking it was somehow daytime in the storm’s eye.

She could only hear her words through the physical radiation of sound across her cheeks.

Eman breathed again for the first time in what felt like eternity. She turned her radio back on. “Alright team. Turn 180. Second pass.”

 She held onto the yoke as she held her presentation board many years ago. She held on and flew.

[dr-neurotic]

Confessional

A week after the murder, I built the courage to see the priest.

I paced the turf between the streetside sign and the church parking lot for twenty minutes. An ultimatum. If the confessional was full, God’s will was for me to go home and suffer quietly. My stomach churned, and step by step, I walked through the church doors. The confessional booth displayed a green light.

I entered the booth and knelt by the window, grateful for the screen that held back judgement and granted me anonymity. “Father, I—”

“Ah, let’s start with the sign of the cross.”

“Yes, father.” I quickly ran my hand up, down and right to left. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit… Bless me, father…” the knot in my throat threatened to burst. “Bless me for I have sinned. It’s been a long time, honestly, since I’ve felt the need, but I had to today.”

“Well, God is happy with you for joining me and joining me with honesty.  What is weighing on your heart, son?”

“See… I killed today.”

The priest on the went silent. Shadow still as a statue on the other side. I had half a mind to leave, but the other half was cocked and ready to let everything out.

“Go on,” he said, finally.

“I was standing in my kitchen in the early evening, when the sun was hardly setting, and the coolness of the ocean had just washed over the island. It was then, I would think, that an intruder came upon my home. I screamed and I struck. It lay there, watching me. I stood with my shoe in my hand, my Sunday best, ironically the weapon used to commit such an act against god.”

I wiped my face and continued. “It watched me with these… knowing beady eyes. Like it was testing me and my faith of God’s plan for this creature.”

“Creature?”

“Yes, a cockroach. Yes, I stood for a tender, ugly hour that passed like sap down the length of a pine. We watched each other. It could not understand why I had to kill it, and I didn’t understand…” My voice cracked. “I didn’t know why it didn’t go somewhere else. Why identify itself to me? Were our natures so cruelly designed to clash in this way? In the end, I made up my mind. I had gone too far and had to end its life. Now I find that the regret of that decision is burning me up. I made it suffer so much pain only to kill it in the end.

“My son…” the priest sighed, and a heavy incense wafted through the grate. “It’s an animal. God’s will claims that it has no soul. You did what you thought was right. It probably felt no pain, no suffering.”

I thought for a moment, hoping the anxiety and guilt would drain from my gut as if the priest had plunged it, but the feeling remained. “But what about my pain, the effect on my soul, father?”

(inspired by some tiktok comment)

[dr-neurotic]

Unholy Matrimony 11-22

Short story exercise - subverting expectations

“Ah, you look lovely,” said the groom in a prim white suit.

The bride stepped into the limousine and carefully removed her veil. “And you, my love, are to die for.”

They shared a laugh, cringing, then broke into silence. No sound save for the pithy blow of the AC. The weight of it all was suffocating—the last major milestone of their lives. They sat a seat apart with both at either window, and both looked out of their windows. Palm trees waved them off.

It smelled like must and a layer of cologne meant to mask it. An old car. The groom had hoped that they would at least splurge a little and send them off in something nice. He ran his hand along the cracked leather seat. The bride sat still as a mannequin, eyes trained on the horizon, wondering what it would feel like.

The driver locked the doors, took a few routine photos for his boss, and the couple was on their designated route. The groom pulled the handle back slowly, slowly, without making a sound. It finally stopped, fully extended. Locked just as he thought.

“How is your mom?” she asked.

The groom shook, startled. “She’ll get better,” he blurted, lighting up for a second. “Operation has been paid for in full. After receiving the money, they were a lot more responsive. Bowed to me on the way out.” He scoffed, but latched onto the peace he received. His mother’s face blazed in his mind. She was mostly unresponsive, confused. But she’s wake up soon thanks to him. “And your family? Your brother has been accepted if I heard correctly.”

The bride winced. “That’s right.” Her parents’ words still hurt. She didn’t choose this. She wanted to go to college too.

“Sorry, I know it’s a lot. Want to talk about something more casual?”

She laughed. It sounded like a stupid idea, but feeling alone, and resentful would be the worst possible thing to take with her as she moved on. Her brother would become something. But… she wanted to be something too. And here she was with the man who was her groom.

The driver set coordinates for the tour around the main street. “You’re doing a great service for the country. Remember that.” He took his coat and left.

The groom pulled open the mini bar. “What’s your pick? They’ve got some decent things in here.”

The bride took a bottle. “To us. Let us go peacefully.”

“For good health and old age,” joked the groom.

But this couple would not grow old. A bomb ticked in the lower compartment, placed by insurgents, placed by their people. The low class couple dressed in frou frou costumes resembled the royal couple meant to die. And as their faces burnt in the fire, it would be impossible to tell.

They would die in that limo. Martyrs so that the true royal couple could live. So their families could taste a  drop of luxury and power.

The bride liked his goofy smile in the face of tragedy. Maybe they would have met and fallen in love for real. In another life she supposed. But at least she wouldn’t be alone in death.