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Is This Day Not Perfect?

by Virginia Backaitis

It was a bad day to get married, sky full of sunshine, rather than rain, and well-wishers standing all around them, chanting, “for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, you have all of us, not only each other.” The band played We Are Family, instead of You and Me Against the World, and her bouquet of roses had been delivered thorns-off rather than thorns-on as she had requested. “Is this day not perfect?” her groom-boy asked as he leaned toward her for a kiss. Perfect was not how she had planned it, still at first she nodded, then smiled, then finally bit his lip and chewed until she tasted blood. “So hot,” he said, a smile on his face as he worked a skeptic stick to stop the hemorrhaging. “So not,” she said and shed a tear wondering where they would come from -- the obstacles, the barriers, the landmines in this new kind of out-of-control life.

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Virginia Backaitis, author of You Lie, I Love, writes fiction, personal essays and articles. If you're interested in reading more of her work, Google!