One's wedding day was meant to be a fairytale -- at least according to people who had not grown up inside one. Fairytales were given to curses and irony, moral lessons that came at the expense of children's lives. On the other hand, there were talking animals. An eloquent pet balanced out a few cooked brats who hadn't minded their parents by wandering into the Forbidden Forest.
Antonia Starkovich had spent twenty-one of her twenty-five years raised by novels and cats. Beyond housing books and rescuing kittens, her parents may have contributed some part to her upbringing, but it must have been slight by comparison.
There were worse upbringings than between the covers of fantasy epics. Toni allowed herself to believe in heroes and the essential ability for good to triumph over evil -- and if good didn't triumph in real life, that was only because it hadn't gotten around to it. One had to be patient. In fairy tales, you had to think the villains had won for a little while, or it couldn't be as sweet when they were vanquished.
Glorious, impossible love pumped through her veins, more ink than blood. Jason Cervantes, the man who would be her husband, was not glorious, and he certainly wasn't impossible. Falling for him was so orderly and inevitable as to be mathematical. Marrying him made sense on almost every level, so she would. No evil twin would stand up when Rowan, their officiant, asked if anyone objected -- and not simply because anyone who allowed sentence in their wedding must be asking for trouble. The wedding would be normal -- blessed and overdue, but normal -- and she could not help but imagine the same could be said for the marriage itself. Jason wouldn't disturb her equilibrium with some third act reveal. He would be a devoted and doting husband as long as she would let him. She had every intention of allowing him, even if she did find it all a touch anticlimactic.
People didn't write stories about good marriages. They wrote them about fraught courtships, star-crossed lovers, torrid reconciliations, and marital enmity. Companionability didn't bring in royalties. People read for escape and -- in what should honestly please the world -- good marriages existed enough that they were not a fantasy.
She would not trade her pleasant enough reality for a more exciting story, no matter how she might feel that she was due one. She had spent decades waiting for her Call to Adventure. It had not come. She had not met any wise threshold guardian who would lead her to rebirth. She waited, and she read. Yes, there were challenges and temptations -- who had a life without these? -- but they were so minor as to have passed through her fingers with little notice.
In fact, the closest thing to a Call that had occurred in her twenties was meeting Jason -- something that riled her feminism. He had not been some dashing rogue who enlisted her to take down a supernaturally powerful despot. He had just asked her on a date and, when that went well, another. He did adore her and rather quickly seduced her into moving in with him. For the first time since college, she had a reason not to live with her mother and to separate herself from her den of books and a clowder of cats.
She supposed that she ought to forgive him for that at some point.
When she woke the morning of her wedding, the house they had rented to contain the wedding party and, in too few hours, the wedding itself was nearly silent.
Toni was glad for this quiet before she walked down the aisle and became Mrs. Cervantes. Though there was no aisle, only a rolling hill, and she would not take his name. Instead, she would become a superhero.
She was altering her identity in the eyes of the gods and the law. That ought to have pressed some divine force into taking notice of her overdue need of a quest. Marriage could be seen as a leap of faith, an act of bravery. If only one or both sets of parents weren't overjoyed with the union, maybe there would be friction enough to spark a fire. Regrettably, Jason's parents had liked her nearly on sight -- better than his erratic lesbian ex -- and Toni's mother accepted that Jason treated Toni at least as well as several cats might.
Toni looked out the window at the green and gray world, at its spite in return. Inconvenience would not be strife enough.
She crept into Amy's room and tapped her in the forehead until her younger sister woke up.
"Oh good, you're awake."
"Yeah..." Amy narrowed her eyes and then felt the weight of the day. All artifice of sleep, of tiredness, fell from her. She sat up, cracking her back in the process. "What do you need?"
"It's raining," Toni began, though this was overstating things. The sky let loose a persistent haze, enough to accumulate in puddles and make slick the grass outside her window, but not a proper, dignified rain that might exhaust itself and pass by. This misting had energy enough to last for the rest of the day if it honestly had a mind to. Not a curse, but an insult whispered out of the corners of one's mouth.
"Nothing we can do about that yet. If it comes down to the wire, we can rearrange the chairs in the tent and go from there," Amy said in a low whisper, almost automatically. Toni wondered how many variations of plans were already prepared in Amy's mind, file cabinets full of possibilities to counteract any misfortune.
It did not matter how unappealing this plan was -- Toni didn't rent the use of this rustic home and its pastoral property to get married in a PVC tent -- so much as that it was a plan she could follow, should the circumstance demand. Before her, Toni saw ten thousand potential imperfections, each one demanding individual redress. Each one stressing her, weighing her down a bit more, and she didn't know which would be the one to break her. She considered that planning for her own inevitable breaking might not be the sort of optimism a bride ought to have on her wedding day.
"Nothing is going to go wrong today," said Amy, reading her mind or at least her expression. "Millions of weddings happen every month, and almost none of them encounter problems. Statistically, you are about to have the most beautiful day of your life."
Toni wasn't sure of the equation, but Amy's tone was reassuring.
The commonplace story is that one's wedding is the happiest day of one's life. She would see about happiness closer to the ceremony. The morning of was harrying, too like a test she had spent months prepping for only to discover that she not only studied the wrong chapters but the wrong subject entirely.
She didn't blame Jason. He was doing his best, but he was that guy on the group project who does not research but gives the presentation because he was outgoing. He was extroverted enough to charm her pants off -- which he had. It wasn't every day, but he could still make her blush with the right look.
But she wasn't happy yet. She didn't see how she could be. She couldn't, at that, remember the last time she had seen a bride happy before her wedding. The Wedding Industrial Complex must spread that lie, a tale too fantastic to be worth the moral: in the desiring to be happy, one couldn't be.
She sneaked back into her bedroom, hoping that she could slow her mind enough to pretend to sleep on Jason's chest for another half hour. Beneath her feet, she could hear Amy moving, which was more soothing than ocean waves and whale song. Her problems were becoming someone else's, someone who would delegate so that Toni could focus on getting hitched.
The moment she laid her head on Jason, he sprung up, pulling the sleeping mask from his face. "What do you need?" Jason said. "Show me the bear, and I'll dive right at the midsection!"
She kissed him lightly. "No bear."
He leaned back onto his elbows, a posture she found suddenly erotic. A wedding did curious things to her hormones. "I need to do something."
She patted him on the chest. "The groom's main job is to show up at the altar, look presentable, and say 'I do.' If you can pull those off, everything else should be fine," she lied. "The bride's job, evidently, is to do everything else or deputize loved ones to do it for her."
He pursed his lips in thought, his eyebrows tenting. "That doesn't seem fair."
"No," she agreed. "But that is what happens. Go back to sleep."
"I really don't feel--"
"Bridal order. Sleep."
Jason opened his mouth to argue but couldn't overrule a bridal order. "You just don't think I'm attractive enough. Need to get more beauty sleep. That's what you said."
She kissed his brow. "That's what you heard. That doesn't mean that is what I said."
She waited at the edge of the bed for another objection, but he kept his eyes closed.
Having awoken two people on this floor, she didn't see the harm in bringing it to three.
She opened Nathaniel's door so slowly that the hinges did not have the chance to creak and, once she visually confirmed at a distance that he was wearing a gory Cannibal Corpse t-shirt, sat on his bed. When this was not enough to wake Jason's best man, she tried it again, bouncing more heavily. As she barely weighed a hundred pounds, this took some effort.
He rolled over and looked at her with sleepy eyes, clutching the blanket with violet nailed fingers.
"Hi," Toni said.
He smacked his lips contemplatively, as though checking to see if his morning breath was too egregious for this conversation. "Hi. Do you need something?"
"For it not to rain, but I've put my sister on that," she said.
He looked over at the window, droplets gathering and running down. "Is Amy good at stopping the rain?"
Toni considered this, eyebrows raising. "Possibly not, but I don't think she has tried yet."
"Jason?"
"Beauty sleep," Toni said. "I needed a little time this morning."
"Time without your fiance?" From another mouth, this would sound accusatory, but she understood that this was a pragmatic question. In his subroutines, Nathaniel had to make sure that boxes were checked.
"No," she said, realizing for the first time how that might have sounded. "But time. I won't get much of it to myself today. It feels as though, once Jason is well and properly awake, the clock starts. If he stays in bed a bit longer, I don't have to be panicking on my wedding day."
"Are you panicking?"
Was she? "No," she decided. "But I also don't have to be."
He scratched the back of his neck. "So, you woke me because you needed time to yourself?"
She shook her head. "I want breakfast. I want to talk. Ergo, I pestered you."
He gave a small laugh at her acknowledgment that she was pestering and that she was the bride and could essentially do as she pleased. "Give me a minute to get dressed."
"Nope," she said. "Bridal orders. Breakfast is had in pajamas." Her own were far from extravagant, little more than a tank top and yellow short-shorts. (She understood that some women, facing their wedding day, may have opted for pink lace -- possibly with rhinestones spelling "bride" or "wife." Her fiance had seen her in rattier and far less, so she could not see the harm in comfort.)
Nathaniel lifted the sheets to his pink, tiger-striped pants.
Toni bit her bottom lip to keep her laughter in place. "Revision of previous order: Breakfast is immediately had in those pajamas in specific."
When she descended the stairs, Amy approached, nearly clicking her heels like a proper attendant. "The forecasts say that rain will end in forty-five minutes and will be sunny for the rest of the day. That provides us hours for the sun to dry the grass." She waited expectantly. Toni supposed this was in case she felt a need to make a bridal order about toweling the grass.
The cupboards were so full that she didn't have the slightest idea what she wanted for the first meal of her wedding day. Nathaniel grabbed a box of cereal and two bowls, one of which she accepted, grateful that this decision had been taken from her, hoping more would follow.
For all her claiming that she needed to talk, she found that she had nothing much to say, just finishing the cereal and starting on a banana (marriage was sure to necessitate potassium).
"There is an exactness to math that always appealed to me," said Nathaniel, taking both their bowls to the sink. It occurred to Toni that someone had kept doing the dishes this weekend. She didn't know who to thank for this.
"There is always an answer," he continued, "even if I cannot figure it out, even if it perplexed ancient Greeks to modern theorists. Somewhere out there, the answer exists. Math isn't cold like people think. There is a beauty to the lines and curves, following the blueprints of nature."
"I sense that this has something to do with this wedding?"
He pointed a spoon her way in acknowledgment as though this were a demonstration of her astuteness. It bordered on sarcasm. "There is an answer to this," he assured. "You hold all the factors in your hand."
"Weddings aren't exact," Toni said. "This wedding in particular."
"No, which is why I prefer geometric sketches to romance -- Eleanor proves that theorem well enough. But this wedding is an equation with a product. You get married," Nathaniel said, extending one finger, "that's one of them. There isn't a way Jason wouldn't marry you today, short of you informing him you've been cheating on him this whole time." He paused for effect alone. "You haven't, right?"
"Not that I recall," Toni said. "I would hope someone would have told me, ideally before it happened, so I could stop it."
"So, you get married. Everything else can be factored away in time, leaving you with both beauty and logic."
She didn't think that she'd ever heard love reduced to math so romantically, no matter he felt about his own career as someone's lover.
Nathaniel sat as though this had been a conversation no different than their long discussions of movies and books.
"You should say that as your best man speech," Toni said.
"I am required to give a speech?" he asked.
She could not tell if he was serious. "Bridal decree. You have to give a speech."
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.