A warm blue sky, a clear September afternoon. It was almost a perfect day, except it wasn’t. The wedding was off.

Thomas had been carrying a bleak cloud, thin but ominous, in his periphery since Marty had announced his engagement. It wasn’t his place to express petty misgivings, and he liked Tess well enough—she was cute and funny. But there was another side to her, too, obscured by her curves and smile. Something more exacting. She pestered Marty with dozens of texts whenever they were on the bowling lane. And she had a habit of tapping a fingernail on something to signal that she wanted it to disappear—Marty’s cooling coffee on the side table, or his bowling shoes in the hallway.

Since Marty’s library of archeology books and sports equipment both seemed to be dwindling, replaced with New Age paraphernalia, Thomas felt there was a lot of tapping going on behind the scenes. And his friend seldom came out bowling anymore. Marty said he was growing up, merging with another human into requisite adulthood. Fair enough.

But then Marty stopped volunteering at the annual Kids Dig, and he gifted Thomas and the rest with most of his artifact collection. Since college, where they’d all met in the anthropology program, all of them had accumulated thrift store treasures and bits of old pottery or bones.

Thomas supposed that ylang ylang oils and amethyst crystals were kind of related to vintage pinball toys and arrowheads, in their own way. So he let nature take its course.

But now, here they were, wedding day. The morning bustled with phone calls and errands. Thomas felt the small thrill of the drama and ceremony. Then, the bombshell. At the last minute, the bride-to-be ran off with a guru of psychitecture. After the text came in, the silk-swaddled handfasting officiant broke it to them with an indignant snort.

Apparently, at last night’s bachelorette party, Tess’s destiny was manifest and she had to go.

There was nothing to do now but drink. The boys, farcical in bespoke threads, at their usual dive. It was early, but a few regulars were installed on their barstools. Classic rock anthems from Boston and the Who crackled from the dying speakers.

Under a dusty buck-head, Marty blubbered about Tess into his palms and a pitcher of Guinness. Thomas thought back to a recent and forgettable date of his own. Jessica yawned through the pasta primavera, though he’d taken great care to choose a rustic, foodie-approved Italian bistro. She’d texted friends throughout a Piaf garden concert. Edith herself, icon that she was, would have found him much more interesting than Jessica did.

Thomas had dated many fewer women than the rest of the gang. He certainly felt their magnetic tides, but he’d always been shy and wary. He found women hard to talk to. Frankly, he preferred to spend weekends at the flea market by the river. In the jumble of objects, that mix of beloved and forgotten possessions, there were grand dialogues and enthralling histories yearning to communicate across time. And he’d had much more riveting discussions with the sundry girl at the ten-pin lane about shoe polish than he’d ever had with a date.

A platter steaming with Tabasco wings lands on the table and jolts Thomas back to the present. The waitress clears a spot for a pizza, too, says she’ll return with a round of bar shots. As he tears a slice off the tray, Keith thumps Marty’s shoulder. “Cheer up, dude,” he says. “It could be worse. I read in The Mirror about this guy who married a pizza!”

Marty had seen the photos, too, in line at the supermarket checkout. A young Russian guy, smiling from a white limousine, making kissy faces at his pizza bride for the photog. It was definitely a publicity stunt, he’d thought at the time. The guy was probably an artist or something.

“You can’t marry a pizza,” Alex laughs. “That marriage wouldn’t last long!”

Even poor Marty is laughing now. “That’s what they call a one-night stand,” he says, scooping gooey cheese with his fingers.

Keith says there was also a woman who married a chandelier. She loved many chandeliers, but when she saw this one in an antique magazine, she knew he was the one.

He pulls up a photo of the woman on his phone. She’s all smiles in bed with her light fixture.

Marty says there’s a guy who married a vacuum, and lots of people who fall in love with bridges or the Eiffel Tower. “One found the long-distance affair too difficult, from Ohio to Paris, so she eventually divorced the tower and got together with a local roller coaster.”

Alex mentions another dude and his calculator. “They’re called objectophiles. These people feel that their objects are animated, that they have spirits. They feel emotional and sexual connections to their objects.”

Keith reaches for another slice of the pie. “Interesting,” he says. “There’s a long history of this kind of belief. Isn’t that more or less what we studied?” He shakes his head, then laughs. “Still, it’s obvious that for the risk-averse or socially misfit, it’s just easier to marry a video game or a car door. Then this doesn’t happen.” He waves his hand over Marty, reminding them all of the debacle of the day.

Thomas takes it all in, chewing carefully and not saying much. He thinks about Jessica and their zero chemistry, about Tess and all her demands. He thinks about his favourite artifact, an ancient terracotta dromedary, humming with the centuries whenever he touches it. He thinks about his bowling ball, so alive, how smooth and soft and warm that resin sphere feels in his hands.

Lorette C. Luzajic

reads, writes, publishes, edits, and teaches flash fiction and prose poetry. Her own fiction and prose poems have appeared in Ghost Parachute, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Unbroken, Trampset, The Citron Review, Flash Boulevard, New Flash Fiction Review, and beyond. Her works have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart, Best Microfiction, and The Best Small Fictions. She won first place in a flash contest at MacQueen’s Quinterly. The author of two collections of small fictions, Pretty Time Machine and Winter in June, she has also acted as judge for the Tom Park Poetry Prize.

Lorette is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to literature inspired by visual art. She is also an award-winning neoexpressionist artist who works with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far. She is also passionately curious about art history, folk horror, ancient civilizations, artisan and tribal jewelry, and culinary lore, to name a few.

Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary in MacQ-9 (August 2021) by Clare MacQueen, with links to additional resources

⚡ Featured Author: Lorette C. Luzajic at Blue Heron Review, with two of her prose poems (“Disappoint” and “The Piano Man”); plus “Poet as Pilgrim,” a review of Pretty Time Machine by Mary McCarthy (March 2020)

⚡ Fresh Strawberries, an ekphrastic prose poem in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize