The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker (story reading txt) 📕

or to nuke it, blanch it, boil it in misery until it became something she would not allow past her lips. At first, it had been more instinct than aesthetic, but when she realized the effect her moods had on her waistline—and on the circumference of each thigh, the bony lumps on top of each shoulder—the two had become inextricably linked: happy+fat or sad+thin. As much as she tried to break the chain—Effie would have been delighted with happy+thin, for example—it seemed to have been forged from sterner stuff than she. And so her silhouette—recently, her increasingly etiolated Nosferatu shadow—had become a barometer for her baseline satisfaction, every bulge or hollow a visceral synecdoche for what was going on in her head.

Her stomach rumbled again as she scrubbed red wine marks from the burnt-orange floor tiles in the Hall, and looking up from her crouch, Effie noticed more shards of broken porcelain beneath one of the long tables. Crawling farther in, she recovered a serving platter, smashed into little pieces.

Clasping them to her breast, she maneuvered herself back out from under the table, and as she did so, a warm pair of hands cupped her hips and moved slowly up along her torso.

“Can I join you in there?” Ben’s voice asked huskily, and Effie thought she might crumble like one of the shards in her hands. “I smell of booze and bleach, but don’t let that put you off.”

She slid farther back and into his grasp, twisted to kiss him as her face reappeared from beneath the tablecloth, and worried belatedly what she might taste like.

“We lost a night together,” he said in an undertone that wouldn’t reach Charlie and Iso, who were clearing the other table. “That bloody sun lounger wasn’t a patch on being in your bed.”

Effie blushed and swallowed the butterflies that had replaced the hunger in her belly.

“Five more left,” she murmured back, and he leaned into her lips once again. “But right now, I need food.”

The others were casting around for tasks and, finding none left to do in the Hall, also began to mutter about eating—but as Effie pulled herself upright, there came a screech and the banging of a door from the upstairs landing, in the direction of the bedrooms.

Whatever it was Lizzie held in her shaking hand when she appeared, ashen, at the top of the stairs was too small to see at a distance, even though the former bride held it out away from her in disgusted horror.

“This is fucking sick,” she called, her voice trembling as much as her outstretched fist. “Sick! What the fuck did I do to deserve this?”

As Effie skittered closer and reached out an arm to guide Lizzie, her teary eyes making her steps unsteady, down the stone staircase, she peered into the other woman’s palm.

The bride figurine from the top of the three-tiered cake, in her sculpted ivory crinoline, and the groom in his black tie.

There was little about Lizzie’s wedding that was bridal in the frilly sense; she had an allergy to anything remotely naff, so even the traditional elements had been streamlined and modernized according to her stringently clean-lines tastes. But the cake decorations had been Lizzie’s one piece of kitsch: she’d found a website that promised to 3D-print the bride and groom’s faces onto a pair of tiny statuettes, using their passport photos. Gleefully, Lizzie had scanned in hers and Dan’s mug shots—“he looks like a murderer in his!” she trilled over the phone to Effie—and she cackled uproariously when the tiny imitations came through and, predictably enough, looked nothing like either of them. She regaled everyone with the story, and even made a photo of the little “Dan” face, with its vacant expression and painted-on beard; it became the one that flashed up whenever her fiancé called her.

Now, though, Effie had to agree that the figures in Lizzie’s hand looked nothing like her and Dan, but that was mainly because they had been—quite carefully and ruthlessly, it seemed—decapitated.

“They were on my pillow.” Lizzie’s voice quavered as she shrugged Effie’s arm off her shoulders and stepped away. “Left on my fucking pillow.”

Effie looked again at the statuettes, their heads so neatly struck—sawn?—from their bodies like doomed Tudor queens. It had been done too precisely on each of them for it to have been anything other than expressly intended.

Effie shuddered: she knew angry drunk people were capable of horrible things, and they had all been very drunk.

But who had been this angry?

18. Anna

Anna felt a chill in the bottom of her stomach when she heard the scream. Scrambling from the kitchen into the Hall, she saw Lizzie’s anxious, blotched face, the headless figurines held in one palm out in front of her. Anna reached an arm to her, but she found she didn’t have the words to soothe this woman she loved so well and felt she now understood so little. The woman who had made the biggest decision of her life—to cancel her wedding—without telling her two best friends first. Without even warning them it was about to happen.

“God, how horrible.” Behind Anna, Steve stepped into the room—ever kind, ever mindful of everybody else’s feelings—from where he had been rinsing dishes at the kitchen sink. “I’m so sorry, Lizzie. For what it’s worth, this would have been an amazing wedding. You must have worked so hard on it.”

Anna’s heart clenched to a tiny dried-out raisin.

The only thing you cared about at ours was whether we had the right audio cables for the DJ.

Which font on the invites? Which flowers? Which tablecloths, which napkins? Which blackboard for the seating plan? Which cousin is it your Auntie Joan can’t stand? Anna had simply stopped asking Steve in the end, so that she wouldn’t have to see him shrug. He didn’t know a ranunculus from a hydrangea, and he didn’t care. The fact that she didn’t either hadn’t seemed to matter after a while: one of them