Off-White Wedding (MF)
by DrSpin

(283 words)

I have a photo of my fiancée, naked. In desperate times, and they're not getting any less desperate, I prop up the photo and I masturbate. It's not a good photo - a snapshot, an amateur job. I have other, better, photos, but she's clothed in those.

It's pathetic, but there's a lot to be said about being pathetic alone. It beats being pathetic in front of 82 people. That's how many were at the church when my fiancée failed to appear. Waiting with sinking heart, I counted them.

Linda. I wonder where she is, what she's doing? She remains my fiancée, technically. She never broke it off. We were formally engaged. A notice appeared in the newspaper. At the engagement party for all her friends we set the date for three months hence.

Everything went like clockwork, except Linda didn't show up at the church. She was late beyond any excuse other than sudden death, and the congregation was restive to the point of mutiny. The organist stopped playing abruptly, and people hissed from a side doorway at me. In the office the awkward, solitary bridesmaid told me Linda had gone away. She didn't know where. There would be no wedding, today or ever. Linda didn't want to get married.

I went back out. "There will be no wedding," I said. "You might as well go home."

There's nothing more humiliating than a cliché come to life. Left in the lurch at the church. It was irreparably pathetic.

There's been no word from Linda. It's been five weeks since our aborted wedding day. Absence has not made her heart fonder.

We only fucked one time. We both said it would get better.