The Reception

The motions of the day were forced. Tradition always forces itself. My face had been painted and my hair puffed up by a stylist at La Migliore Salon in Menlo Park, California to at least look as though I were enjoying those motions. It was Christmastime in northern California. Hard, sad sun shone on tinsel, and fir trees with blue and silver balls and fake snow looked embarrassed at their own displacement, as they had every Christmastime for my entire California childhood. The venue had a useless, festive wood-burning fire lit in the lobby. It spread no warmth but was a pretty picture.

The blood in me wasn’t yet flowing, not to my extremities, not far enough from my still pulsing core to warm my fingers, blush my cheeks, push my hair out from the roots into something lush and vital. The outside of me appeared to be dead, but if you’d sliced into me you’d have found green inside, vines that bled red, places where I could still feel the pain of a blade. My dress was filmy empire-waisted cream spattered with hopeful pink roses. The blood not yet having reached my outermost layers, I’d seen it necessary to paint the rosiness on in various artificial ways: the roses on the dress, a peach orchid, wilting, set floppy in my hair like an afterthought, and lip color, sticky, named “pink lotus”. Since when, I wondered as I pressed them together like dough and peeled them apart throughout the night, had I even become the sort to paint my mouth pink? That phase of life had snuck up on me, was proof of a grave imbalance of things, a desperate vanity, liquid and untrappable and able to be faked for a short while with the help of certain goops and powders.

I saw that day that it was possible to hope and hate at the same time, that a person could permit both and still exist. It would take only about five months after that for my living core to be adequately worked by his warm, calloused hands until the blood sp read at last out into my limbs and filled them with that plump, quiet eroticism that all fertile life suggests. I would feel married then, and only then, when I realized five months later that another being had encircled me like a spell and allowed me a spectacular, private renaissance. Five months later I would see that I’d gone from a lifeless rock on a barely reigned-in course to smooth, turgid cycling moon who did not so much rule the tides as sweep them up in my vortex, such that only those with an excessive amount of knowledge would interpret me, in my fullness, as being at all separate from what moved chorus-like in my midst.

They called it a wedding reception. I knew it to be their last chance at touching me, the groveling, clawing beasts. Soon my fullness would blow them all backwards, leave them shocked on their bottoms with scraped elbows in the hot, dry dirt. Soon their homes would burn and I’d say, quietly, I’d seen it coming.

By the following winter we’d have escaped the coastal fires and made moves northward, towards the cold, towards justice, and I would meet you, squinch-faced and full of wrath, and wonder how I would ever explain to you, one of these coming days, why my smile in our reception photos looked strained. I’d give you that cream dress with the pink roses, I decided, and the short, cherryred one we were married in. I’d always been different, I’d tell you, always roiled through life pulling and pushing the world about the way moons do and Daddy, Daddy was like the sun. When Daddy was seventeen his hair was orange and luminous as flames, his skin so pale it was almost lilac.

Sometimes, I’d tell you, fire was good, and you’d blink back at me and take shallow, shocked breaths, mulling it over.

Elizabeth Bolton is a doctoral researcher at the University of Toronto where she studies poetic literacy practices. In addition to poetry, she writes narrative and hybrid works. Most notably, her stories and poetry have appeared in Open Minds Quarterly, Event, NoD, Wayfarer and Dark Ink Magazines, among others.