2022 Short Fiction Award Winner: Joshua Levy
Wedding Rice by Joshua Levy
Many lines in this story are lyrics from the song “Pigeons,” written by Bill Callahan, (C) 2020 Your/My Music (BMI), from the album Gold Record. The lyrics are highlighted in red.
Well, the pigeons ate the wedding rice and exploded somewhere over San Antonio.
I picked up the newlyweds and asked them where they wanted to go. They said, “We don’t care, we don’t know, anywhere, just go.”
“I can do that,” I said.
I piloted the limousine out of the parking lot and past rows of painted wooden houses clinging to the sides of the road. We were thirty miles from Mexico. They had tied the knot in Brackettville – at that phony Alamo. The bride winked in my rear-view mirror while her husband nibbled gleefully on her earlobe. Her hair was auburn, her skin the color of finely stirred chocolate milk – just a real good-looking girl in a tight, white wedding dress. Meanwhile, the groom was taller and blonder and more muscular than I could ever be. Neither of them was wearing a mask, but I wasn’t either, so I wasn’t going to bring it up.
The newlyweds were laughing about some uncle named Jack who’d gotten too drunk and cried during his toast.
“What a doofus,” they said. “But, also, like, what a total sweetheart!?”
As I drove, brief scenes played out in the windows of the houses. A man spooning soup; two women laughing hysterically in matching armchairs; a baby hoisted towards the ceiling by – well, probably the father.
The next time I looked in the rear-view mirror, things had evolved. The bride was straddling the groom and rocking back and forth on his lap. So, I raised the privacy divider and counted mailboxes zooming by.
Soon the road thickened into a country highway and yellow dashed lines broke-out in the pavement like a rash. I drove between two lanes and imagined that my limousine was a giant zipper, and my job was to zip-up all the dashed lines on the highway. In this way, I might heal America – which, lately, had been coming apart at the seams.
Lonely, I lowered the privacy divider: hoping to catch love in action.
“Care for some gum?”
The newlyweds were still in their clothes, but their bodies had become so entwined that they responded as if a single living creature.
“Huh?” they said. “Oh, yeah, okay, sure.”
I pawed inside the glove compartment, fingers traveling over crumpled maps, binders, an empty protein bar wrapper. The gum was buried under my handgun.
“Bombs away!” I hollered.
The gum thumped the groom on the bridge of his nose. He yelped like a dog, and we all laughed.
Ever since I’d gotten married, I’d started working weddings, graduations, and funerals. Eventually, the events bleed into each other and you begin to recognize the same recycled faces in the different parties.
I drove up a dusty hill dotted with prickly pear cactus and animal carcasses, while the newlyweds focused on each other’s bodies. On the radio, a lawyer wanted to know if I’d recently been injured in a car accident. I hadn’t, so I changed stations until Dolly Parton was singing a sad ass song. I kept my eyes on the road. Dolly turned into Johnny, turned into Bonnie, turned into John Prine, turned into Hank Jr.
Outside of Concan, the groom noticed my gold wedding band.
“You got any advice for us, old man?”
Well, I thought for a mile. Finally, I said, “Take pains to chew your food.”
The groom snorted. “That’s deep,” he said.
“Any more pearls of wisdom?” asked the bride.
I wiped at a smudge on the windshield, but it turned out to be on the outside of the car, so I stopped doing that. I said, “Make babies. That’s your glue on days you can’t stand each other. Babies are Crazy Glue when a marriage gets a crack in it.” I laughed, but they didn’t, so I added, “Don’t you want babies?”
The bride said, “Oh, yes!” The groom kind of nodded.
“One plus one equals three with a baby. That’s romantic arithmetic,” I said, and I scratched at my nose until a flake of dead skin detached. Then I rolled it into a ball and launched it into the universe.
After I’d said my piece, we drove on in silence. How my words had gone over, I couldn’t tell. Potent advice or preachy as hell?
My wife and I didn’t have any children. We tried, we couldn’t. For years it was all we talked about and then we weren’t even able to do that. It had been about a month since I’d spoken with my wife at all. The last time was in the kitchen, when out of the blue, she said, “I blame the end of our marriage on you not lifting a finger when I choked on those Cheetos.”
I put my fork down on my plate. I was almost done eating, anyways.
“What?”
“Oh, there are other reasons,” she continued. “Your passive aggressive jokes about my weight, the socks on the floor, and all the white lies we’ve fed each other. But – and here’s where I want to be honest – that time I choked on a Cheeto and you didn’t even ask if I was okay? I just can’t forgive you for that.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Karen says I deserve ‘a man of action.’ Like Eric. She’s always comparing you to Eric. Last week, Eric beat-up a teenager who was stealing Amazon packages from their front porch.”
“You want me to beat-up a teenager?”
“What I’m trying to say is that I want a divorce, honey.”
“Is this the menopause talking?”
“Don’t you even!” she said.
“I’m serious,” I said, because I’m an idiot. “What’s this about Cheetos? I don’t know anything about Cheetos. Do you want to hear what I think? I think you’re thinking of someone else, that’s what I think.”
She stood out of her chair faster than I’d ever seen her move before and walked straight out of the kitchen.
“Where did you store our luggage!?” she said. She practically screamed it down the hall.
I went to the liquor cabinet and poured us drinks but drank them both while I listened to drawers slamming in our bedroom.
Somewhere in Concan, we passed a playground. The newlyweds shouted, “Hey! Please! Stop!” So, I stopped.
The pair spilled out and raced towards a swing-set. The bride barefoot, the groom hot in pursuit. I pulled an insulated thermos out of a bag on the passenger seat and took a satisfying swig. The thermos was filled with whiskey and a few drowned ice cubes.
Through the windshield, I watched the groom hoist the bride on to a swing and shove her closer and closer to the sun. Children ran in a sloppy circle around the swing set, kicking-up sand. They looked like tiny ninjas behind their COVID masks.
Suddenly, the bride launched herself off the swing and hung in the breeze for a perfect second before gravity got its hooks in her and dragged her back down. She landed on her feet and they both scurried over to a slide.
These two will be awhile, I thought, climbing out of the limousine.
I meandered through the park. It was humid outside. I felt my chest hairs stick to my dress shirt almost immediately.
At the other end of the park was a cemetery. I approached one of the headstones. In dainty calligraphy, the inscription read:
Christine McCray: 1942 – 2017
James McCray: 1939 –
I placed a finger on the smooth, unblemished spot of the slab of stone where James’s date of death would be added when he died, and I tried to guess the date.
‘I hope you get to see your wife soon,” I whispered.
The stone was warm. On the left-hand side of the grave, in front of the headstone, was a flowerbed with purple flowers and a plaque with the word ‘Christine.’ To the right of this was only grass, for now. I wondered how couples decide who goes where in the ground. I’d want my usual side of the bed.
I still loved my wife. I told her I loved her almost every day we were together, for over thirty years. Christ, I even loved waking up early on the weekends just to watch her sleep. She had this way of turning on her side and spooning her pillow and scrunching her toes and poking them out of the sheets that killed me. Once upon a time she used to love me too. Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, her love must have faded like a suntan, until one day it was gone.
I guess I don’t understand love as well as I thought I did. Last week, before working a wedding, I drove to the library for the first time in decades and asked the librarian if she had any books to fix a broken relationship. I was out of ideas by then. The librarian recommended the book ‘Loving for Dummies.’ She said I’d find it in the Social Sciences aisle. I read the first twenty pages sitting on a faded library armchair by the gender-neutral bathroom. The author kept talking about how love is a verb, how love isn’t something you say, it’s something you do. I wish they taught things like that in school.
I lifted my thermos to my lips, but it was empty.
When I got back to the limousine, the newlyweds were nowhere in sight. They weren’t in the playground – which had grown a new crop of children and parents, and they weren’t inside
the limo – which I had accidently left unlocked. I climbed messily inside the driver’s seat and closed my eyes. But I couldn’t stop picturing my wife’s face, so I opened my eyes again. A few seconds later, when they closed again, all I could see were shades of black.
I woke to banging on my window. The groom was holding a greasy paper bag up for me to see. The bride raised her empty hands to her mouth and pretended to take a giant bite out of something delicious.
“Thanks for waiting,” the groom said, sliding in. “We got crazy hungry.” “What’s next for you two?” I said.
“Like, now that we’re married?” the bride asked.
“Where should I drop you off?”
“Oh! Ha!” the bride said.
The groom crammed a fat French fry into his mouth. “Our waitress recommended a cool hotel, but I don’t remember the name. It starts with an ‘F.’”
“The Frio Country Resort,” the bride said.
“I know it well,” I said, and started to drive.
The bride said, “I told you I’m good with names, baby.”
“Baby, you’re fucking amazing, and that’s exactly why I married you.” “Let’s get married again tomorrow,” she said.
“What’s next for you two, anyways?” I asked. “You’ve got me curious.” “Huh?” they said.
“Now that you’re married.”
“Like, our hopes and dreams and etcetera?” she said, tipping her head to the side. “Bingo.”
“We have big dreams,” the groom said.
“The biggest,” added the bride. “Huge!”
But I didn’t hear them after that. I was daydreaming about my own bride. On our honeymoon, naked in bed, my wife had torn a sheet of paper from the hotel stationary and we’d written a list of the things we were excited to do together. We wrote: ‘visit the pyramids,’ because a traveling mummy exhibition had been our first date, and we wrote: ‘get good at tennis,’ because tennis seemed like something we could do together, and we wrote: ‘grow a family.’
I remember a lot of dreams that didn’t happen.
“Wait! Snacks for the hotel!” they yelled.
We had passed a 7-Eleven.
I made a sharp U-turn and parked facing the gas station. Arms linked, the newlyweds went inside.
I felt sad and congested. I opened the glove compartment and found a crumpled tissue. I blew my nose one nostril at a time. Then I removed the handgun and placed it on my lap. It had been a Christmas gift from my wife. I was pretty sure it was loaded. I stared at the gun.
Finally, the newlyweds came out of the 7- Eleven. Their faces were bright and vivid in the sunlight. The groom was gripping a bottle of wine and the bride had a humongous bag of chips tucked under her arm. They were holding hands. Jesus Christ, they looked happy.
The bride let go of the groom’s hand to reach inside the bag of chips. They were framed in the center of my windshield, like I was watching a drive-in movie. The groom said something, and the bride burst out laughing. She pointed to her throat. She kept pointing to her throat.
Something wasn’t right. I flung open the car door, and I ran.
“I see you!” I yelled. “I see you! I see you!!”
I ran behind her and stuck out my leg and clasped my hand around my fist and thrust it into her stomach until the groom yanked me off her and she gasped and began to cough.
Everything seemed out of focus. I rubbed my eyes with my sleeve, but the bride still looked blurry. She could have been any bride.
“What the hell!” the groom shouted. “Why did you do that?”
My hands were trembling. I rubbed my eyes again, and when I turned my hands back over, they were wet.
The groom slapped me hard on the back. “Whatever, man,” he said. “It’s all good.”
The bride scowled at me. I bent down and slowly, carefully, picked up the bag of chips and handed it to her. But she wasn’t holding it properly, and a few chips spilled out. The groom kissed the top of the bride’s head and she looked up at him and smiled. A few more chips spilled out. The newlyweds started walking towards the limousine. A white pigeon loitering by the car lifted into the air. While it flapped away, I remembered reading somewhere that pigeons mate for life.
I was still thinking about that when I drove home. Then I lost my grip on the whole damn thing.
Joshua Levy writes in many genres (poetry, fiction, memoir, and graphic novel). He was recently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Writer-In-Residence and appears often on CBC Radio and CBC Television. Levy’s work has been published by Oxford University Press, Vehicle Press, and Mansfield Press, and has appeared in such literary magazines as the Rumpus, Malahat Review, Maisonneuve, Vallum, the Puritan, Prairie Fire, Queen’s Quarterly, and Event. He is a recent winner of the CNFC/Carte Blanche Nonfiction Prize, Prairie Fire Nonfiction Prize, SLS Nonfiction Prize, CBC Fiction Prize, Globe Soup International Fiction Prize, and Grain Short Fiction Prize. Levy is in the final stage of writing his first novel and welcomes agents and publishers to contact him through www.joshualevy.net. Levy lives in Montreal, Canada with his wife. They recently became parents.
31 January 2023
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