08.06.06

wafers

The rain plastered bark strains of hair to their foreheads as the boys jumped over the brittle biscuit gravestones. “It’s going to be a good wedding!” they yell, and their mouths open wide showing teeth almost perfect save some missing tooth waiting to be filled with its elder brother. They run by the chapel pushing each other, in the uniform of little boys, their linen pants pushed up over their thin knees and splattered now with rainwater. They laugh at the bride’s blessing.
The mother had been standing (unmistakably, for in her sherbet coloured stance she could be no one else) in the middle of their path and she frowned as the boys pushed her aside.
The organ and the storm had begun at the same time and the bride’s march was accompanied by the sound of thunder outside of high stonewalls. The soft scraping of the rubber sneakers of her new wedding guests bounced off of the walls, whispering to her as she walked to the nave. They, like the vacant eyes of the saints around her, watched as she knelt. They, like the marble pope praying in dim candle light, listened to the faint crinkling of her dress against the stool’s velvet.
Then, all at once, the gates had shut.

shi-ou-sama at 10:22 p.m.

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