A Breath of Ecstasy: Short Stories, Flash Fiction, and Other Goodies

marry us (300 words)

Even now, standing just outside the church doors, listening to the organ start to swell, they called to her. She shook her head, trying to focus on the moment, on the man waiting at the end of a short walk.

Her baby niece skipped forward through the doors, already spilling half her rose petals. She smiled to see the chubby little girl, but the eldritch melody came to twine insistently about her, pulling at her spirit, standing the hair up on her arms.

A long, slow blink then, losing herself in the music for a heartbeat, then shaking it off imperceptibly. "All right, honey," said her sister, kissing her soundly on the cheek. "Get in there and marry that wonderful man."

She laughed and smiled and blinked back tears, and briefly the moment was everything it should have been.

"No," sang the voices, a haunting chorus. "Marry us, marry life, bind yourself to no man..." The invisible violins swelled up in a frenzy then, filling her with chills and a frisson of sensation somewhere between terror and pleasure. She gasped sharply.

"Sweetheart?" asked the man at her side. His father--hers was long dead.

"Would you bind yourself in metal chains?" whispered a woman's voice in her ear, sweeter than honey and smoother than silk. Her eyes filled with tears just to hear it, and suddenly the comb in her hair, necklace on her collarbone, heavy, heavy band on her finger burned and ached.

A sudden, wild wind tore past the steps, redolent of honeysuckle and earthy leaves, and even the man at her side seemed to hear the joyous laughter in it.

"Break free, be one with us!" they hissed in rising crescendo, and she trembled, crying out suddenly. Was it pain or release?

The doors opened.