Portraits of unyielding love. A woman, mostly alone in her world but for her dog, shares memories through letters to her old 'tesoro'; a wife trusts her sweetheart psychiatrist blindly through her divorce; a young girl lands a fairy tale wedding soon to turn into a nightmare her cousin yearns to fix. Immersive, witty, tender,
Caro M, explores the hurricane-like devastation love is capable of.
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‘Is there something wrong?’ I rushed after her in a flash. She had escaped to the ladies, being unable to contain herself at the head table. But despite having seen her only from my own table tucked in the corner behind hers, I had known straight away they were not tears of joy.
‘She’s fine, let her be,’ her mum said. She too had rushed behind Laura. ‘She has been a bit under the weather.’ My aunt’s words were delivered too firmly, with an unlikely tension considering it was her daughter’s wedding. She had always been sweet despite the family she had married into, our family.
‘I’ve had a cold all week and don’t feel up to much partying.’ Laura’s voice was weak.
I took in her full image by the sink, washing her wedding ring finger with cold water. I thought she looked like she was gutting fish, in her wedding dress, cold intestines against human fingers. She was lying. Her mum gave her a vitamin pill and started rearranging her dress. ‘At least you will be in Thailand in a few days.’ That’s where they had booked for the honeymoon.
Suddenly rivers flooded from Laura’s eyes. I had only been trying to cheer her up!
Her mum looked at me sternly, unable to hide her alarm, then waved me out of the ladies’ with her hand and I did nothing but follow her lead. It’s too bad we fail to live up to unexpected moments...
Quotes:
Your hand was trembling and you passed the note to me quickly like in a Soviet spy movie. I crunched it in my hand and walked away. I could tell you were staring at the back of my golden dress.
‘Stay where you fit in,’ my uncle had rightly advised me before the wedding, but I hadn’t taken his advice. Where exactly did I fit in, other than in the psych ward?
All his money seemed to light Laura up like a beauty pageant; not that she wasn’t beauty-pageant material even without it.
Was I a commodity for you at an acquisitive time? Were you a collector? Should I fret about the value placed on me perhaps as an exotic object? Because I was French? I didn’t think of French as exotic but then I was it, and you cannot be foreign to yourself, although perhaps I was exactly that.
We had known so little about this man yet had let Laura wed him. And at her own wedding she was crying.
‘My husband fucked the woman who delivered our baby!’ I clamour again, full of honesty. It’s good to peak twice, to extend the peak for as long as possible.
I will never forget the sweetness with which you dried their hair. It made me think the world of you; it made me think how life is to be based purely on emotion. After that, I was lost.
Was I guilty of puffing up a dream which could grow expectations larger than Albatross wings? Yes. But then I remembered how I was in violation mode, and that the only purpose of a dream was perhaps not to come true but to break all cages, breach all rules and run around fiercely free.
Mari.Reiza was born in Madrid in 1973. She studied at Oxford University and worked as an investment research writer and management consultant for twenty years in London, before becoming an indie fiction writer. Also by her, Inconceivable Tales, Death in Pisa, Sour Pricks, A Pack of Wolves, STUP, Mum, Watch Me Have Fun!, Marmotte’s Journey, West bEgg, PHYSICAL, Room 11, Triple Bagger, Opera and the Retreat, all available on Amazon.
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