A Sudden Hail of Gunfire, a Wedding and a Dance​

Fiction by K Russell Breakstone

We had hoped for an outdoor wedding, but a sudden hail of gunfire forces us inside. We grab our deck chairs and run laughing as the bullets splash into the marble patio and unlace the delicate flowers from the altar. Ah, but these things happen. Safe inside the lobby of the historic hotel, we trade stories of our own disastrous weddings: the rain from a sunny sky, the double-booked vineyard, the salmon left under heat lamps for far too long. We can still hear the crash and bang of gunshots, but now that we stand beneath the crystal chandelier, surrounded by the gilded frames of landscapes and mirrors, and all of us scrambling to arrange the deck chairs into rows with the groom’s side over there and the bride’s side over here, we feel that wonderful swelling that rises spontaneously at weddings, that feeling of all of us linking arms around the lovely couple, of sheltering them with our bodies, of being one great body ready to chant, “We do!”

And they are a lovely couple. We love them dearly; many of us have known the wife since she was a pink and screaming baby. They’d met at some kind of group event, we’ve heard, speed-dating on the beach, and only recently did they move together to this busy city in the south. She is a brilliant epidemiologist, and we all know exactly what that entails. A doctor, we assume. Diseases, perhaps? And he is a teacher, can you believe it, working all day with young children, so patient and kind. A lovely couple. After the rehearsal dinner some of us had been invited back to their house for mint juleps. We sat on their screened-in porch and looked out into the night and talked about our health as the bullets flashed and the cicadas called out like a tape being rewound over and over again.

To be young and in love! We watched with hunger at their touches, the way their bodies met at the hips, at the shoulders, how he would trail a hand across her back as he passed her in the narrow kitchen. How she propped her bare feet in his lap and laid back into the cushions of her adirondack chair. Sipping our cocktails in the heat of the night, the gunshots drifting off towards downtown, and the ceiling fan moving the air about, we felt decadent, we felt southern.

Many of us have traveled here from northern climates, for the wedding. Many of us have turned the wedding into a week-long vacation, and you may have seen us doddering around town, waving to each other across busy intersections. We visited the old ward, the new food halls, the boardwalk through the humid marshy woods. We went to the museum of art, the museum of the diaspora, the museum that celebrates the history and triumph of a soda brand. We bought things from gift shops that will fit in our carry-ons.

All week there’d been scattered gunfire. It drove us through the open doors of restaurants, and we’d been delighted to discover little gelato shops and galleries by local artists. There’d been a sniper on the highway and what sounded like a minor war as we strolled a neighborhood with ferns hanging from the eaves of every house. The young couple tells us the violence is localized, and it’s true. Those of us only a few blocks away at the zoo heard the faint pop of gunshots but didn’t even feel the breeze of a bullet.

We asked the young couple if they were sure an outdoor wedding was wise. We knew that they had planned, originally, on a small ceremony at the courthouse and a brunch at their home. But the bride’s family had offered to pay for a larger reception, and to be honest we are thankful. Great love deserves to be spoiled, don’t you think? And once we settle in the hotel lobby, with the altar rescued by groomsmen, we wait in anticipation for the arrival of the lovely couple. Outside, the gunfire intensifies, and the walls quiver and ring with the impacts, and we do feel, for a moment, frightened, just as how our ancestors must have felt watching the unfurling of lightning bolts from the shelter of their caves. But then the doors open and the music starts- Stevie Wonder, how quaint- and the procession begins. We ignore the shots and wave as the flowergirl and ringbearer, both still in diapers, wander open-mouthed down the aisle, followed by the groomsmen and bridesmaids, the parents, and, as the cacophony outside reaches what we hope must be its zenith (someone is having fun with a machine gun), there is the groom, and within breaths the bride.

Oh!

Between all of us, we have been to a thousand weddings. We have traveled to islands, we have waited in the sun and shivered in dark churches. We have worn flowers in our hair, we have line danced with strangers, we have eaten every flavor of cake, and some of us have even ministered weddings, once in costume. It is an effort for us to not judge every aspect of this wedding against all the weddings we have known; we have sat in seats more comfortable than these, we have been served cocktails more clever, we have seen celebrities in the bridal party. And yet when the groom looks down the aisle at the bride there is such a light there, and the smile that comes to his face makes us realize that he was incomplete this whole time, and only now, with her present, is he a full human being. Our stuttered breaths and the receding bullets make a sound like waves, and we all think of the story told about them, the bonfire at the beach after the speed-dating, how she sat down next to him and they never parted again.

Their love, their love! It is like seeing colors again after a black-and-white dream, it is like cracking open the spine of a newly-bought novel, it is like the bite of wasabi in a sushi roll. Our loves are ragged in comparison, adopted cats with one ear missing, worn and breathing shallow breaths beneath the skirting of our beds. Our loves are survivors, of cancer and children, of trial separations, of attempted affairs. Our loves are tulip bulbs hanging dry in the back of the garden store. But that look between the groom and bride, it is the warm soil, it is the gentle draping of sunlight and rain. We hold our lovers’ hands, tightly. We grip their fingers so hard the wrinkles stretch smooth over knuckle bones. We kiss their liver-spotted skin and the laugh-lines wet with happy tears.

By the time the bride and groom say their vows, there are only a few faint gunshots echoing in the distance, but even still we lean forward and watch their quivering lips. He loves how she tends so carefully to his fragile heart, helps him stand against the weight of the world, and holds his hand over her eyes during scary movies. She loves how he always brews extra coffee, even when she says she doesn’t want any, because he knows she’ll come to the kitchen asking for a cup. When they kiss we stand and applaud, so loud that a firing squad could be holding practice just outside the hotel doors and we’d be none the wiser.

There’s food in the ballroom; we’re swept away by the best man and maid of honor. Rumors are spreading that their wedding is next, and as we eat we make lists of who will be invited. Then we rise with more rapturous applause as the newlyweds enter arm in arm. We watch them dance, we roar as they paint each other’s mouths with cake, we cannot keep our eyes off of them. The power could go out, the whole city darkened, and the wedding would be lit with the electricity between them. Its static lifts the fine hair of our arms, it makes our hearts riot against our breasts.

The timeless night passes. Have we ever danced so much? Our cheeks hurt from laughing. The newlyweds are leaving, we swirl into the lobby again to say goodbye. Though many of us are staying in this historic hotel, the lovely couple is returning home. And isn’t that even more romantic? To make love in the hollow their bodies have worn into their mattress, to be greeted by the same sunlight they awaken to each morning in each other’s arms. The newlyweds have to push through us to leave. Everyone is laughing through tears. We reach out to them like they are saints. In the parking lot an uncle stands by a car with an open door, he has offered to drive them home. They wave, sovereigns of love, and we flow out behind them and blow kisses, we throw flowers stolen from the hotel lobby.

And they drive away. Into their lives. Into the sunset of this moment, this great flare of love that will rest like a red cinder in our memories, so that we only have to blow on it to rekindle the flames, each time we talk to each other over the phone and say, “Oh, what a wedding!”

​It is still in the parking lot. We can hear music playing from the ballroom through the hotel’s open doors. We turn and take hands, hold shoulders and hips, loop wrists around stooped necks. We dance over the pavement, between the cars. Galaxies dazzle overhead. Frogs serenade from ditches at the borders of the lot. We dance and we dance. And when the shooting starts, we keep dancing. And though the pavement pits and windshields shatter, though the streetlights blink out one by one, though the gunfire grows louder and more eager and there are footsteps all about us, somehow, somehow our dancing keeps us safe, and we twirl and twirl through the tracings of the bullets, and we know that if only we can keep dancing, if only the music keeps playing, if only the love of this evening never fades away, then we will never feel the sting of lead, we will never spill blood on the still-warm asphalt, we will never be victims, only lovers, only lovers.

K Russell Breakston

K Russell Breakstone is a teacher and writer. He lives with his wife and son in Atlanta, Georgia.​