The Creative Competitor

Wedding Dress Fiction Competition

Witness to Destruction

Winner – Cliff Marks

As I touch the lace in my roughened hands, I imagine what you would have looked like wearing it.Masses of white material against your olive soft skin and cascading dark hair. You would have looked beautiful and I feel cheated that I will never see you walk up that aisle, your eyes sparkling and shimmering with tears of joy. The dress bodice would have accentuated your curves and I would have felt a deep ache within, a mixture of love and lust rising with every beat of my heart.

I feel tears threatening to fall and I try to do the manly thing and restrain them, but my eyes are blurring and my hands trembling as I realise what I have lost.
The dress taunts me, I want to tear it off the hanger and shred it into a thousand little pieces but deep inside, my rage burns with the pureness of my love and I know that I won’t, can’t destroy what is left of you, your perfume still lingers on the delicate lacework and I inhale you deep inside.

This all-consuming need to hold you rises up and makes me choke. How long will I have to suffer the pain of a love lost? How will I ever get beyond this emotion to some sort of normality where I feel something over than pain?

I feel a hand on my arm and I turn to see the concerned face of my sister. She looks lost, afraid and helpless. I have always been the strong one in the family, the one they all turned to and yet now, I see her struggling to take on this new role and she doesn’t know how to comfort me. I slip back into the role I have always played and hold her whilst she cries and mutters how it isn’t fair, and I didn’t’ deserve it and she would do everything in her power to help me get through this…but we both knew that there was nothing that she could do. Not unless she had the power to turn back time.

I want to die. I want to sink into oblivion and forget that I ever existed. Forget my whole life, wipe it out in an instant, forget all of the good times, my successes and accomplishments because right now they mean nothing….not even the medals for bravery awarded to me for helping my fellow soldiers. There is no meaning in anything anymore.

I find that I am sat on the bed still staring forlornly at the dress but aware that the mattress on which I sit was our supposed marital bed and that I should have been making her mine in only a few hours. The promise of her sweet lips on mine, the feel of her in my arms, pulling me ever closer and promising me that our honeymoon would be one I would never forget.

The bitter irony sweeps over me. She was right, I would never forget it, the pain, the utter loneliness and I dreaded sliding beneath the new silk sheets, feeling my loneliness swallowing me up whole.

Time passes and the cloudy day starts to turn dark, I finally reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the crumpled note, the one that was supposed to make the darkness less threatening and the uncertainty clearer… I read..

Dearest Glen,
I am so sorry that I could not tell you face to face and that I am such a coward to leave you this note.
It hurts me to admit that I cannot marry you, love you in the way that you should be loved. I’m not sure when the realisation hit me but I couldn’t bring myself to utter the words that would hurt you and see the pain in your eyes.
By the time that you read this, I will be gone and I hope one day you bring yourself to forgive me….

I crumpled the paper into a ball, sheer anger pulsating through my fist. Forgive her? I wanted to kill her! How could I ever forgive the betrayal of leaving me at the altar so that all of our guests could witness the annihilation of my soul and see me crumple to the ground and weep? A former war hero turned to a writhing mass of human emotion.

But more than that, how could I ever forgive her betrayal of loving another man? Not just any man, but my twin brother. The man who was so identical to me in every way, and yet who had been able to bring love into her life when I had been unable to. The double betrayal!

I look over at the wedding dress and want to rip it up into shreds! But as I begin to cry and mourn my loss, I know that I won’t, it will be the only comfort I get through the night, imagining her in it as I hold the dress to me, inhaling her scent and trying to forget that my brother would be making her his that very night.