By Zenia deHaven
Just as the organist struck the first chord for “Here Comes the Bride,” the electricity in the chapel coughed and died.
This bride and groom were uncharacteristically relaxed on their wedding day. They were not the kind of people to micromanage every dilemma they could get their soon-to-be-wedded hands on. Mistakes happen. Life happens.
That said, they did not expect that a fallen power line four blocks east would fry the electricity for the entire building the second after the bride took her first step toward her betrothed.
The illuminated room flooded with darkness. With the overcast sky, only sparse slivers of sunshine broke through the dark clouds. The stained glass windows depicting Biblical events cast fickle oranges and reds onto the pews below. A splash of red painted the seething mother of the bride in the front row. The groom thought that was fitting.
A child started crying. Guests murmured, casting nervous looks between the groom’s place at the altar and the bride frozen mid-walk down the aisle. The groom’s mouth twitched, with what, irritation? Anxiety? No one could tell.
No one, except the bride, of course. Even beneath the shroud of a silver veil, in the darkness of a church that was due for renovations two decades ago, the bride knew that the groom was trying not to laugh.
The bride had less self-restraint.
She laughed.
It wasn’t a pretty laugh, one that echoed from the sky and could have been mistaken for the melody of a fallen angel. The sound came from the recesses of her throat and grated against her teeth as she tried to stop it. It was hardly a laugh at all, more of a startled chortle, something you’re more likely to hear from a spooked swine than a bride.
She stopped, resisting the urge to cover her mortified face with her hands. She prayed that her veil masked the redness blossoming in her cheeks. They were in the house of God, after all. Wasn’t this a good time for a miracle?
The guests were silent. Even the child who’d had an outburst ceased as if he understood the horror of their predicament. The mother of the bride looked like she was trying to summon the wrath of Satan to drag her daughter into fiery damnation on her behalf.
Then the groom laughed. It was a full-belly, bending-over-with giggles laugh. The family and friends in attendance didn’t join in, too afraid to insult the bride, but there was an audible breath of relief. Smiles flashed amongst previously panicked faces. It was going to be okay, they realized. An ugly laugh from the bride was not the end of the world.
This was what the bride repeated in her mind to keep herself from collapsing and letting her thick polyester dress swallow her whole.
The best man fumbled out his phone and turned on the flashlight for the organist. The musician frowned, unapproving of this unorthodox precedent, but when the best man gave him a cold look that promised consequences, the organist huffed and turned back to the keys. The booming thrums of “Here Comes the Bride” ensued.
The bride resumed her trek, carefully moving each foot before the other as if walking across a tightrope. A power outage, she could handle. A humiliating laugh that would haunt her dreams was not great, but manageable. Falling flat on her face midway down the aisle in front of everyone she knew and loved? That was out of the question. She would have no choice but to flee the country and change her name.
She reached the altar. A soft blush illuminated her beloved’s face, his soft green eyes brimming with tears. He brushed them away with the back of his hand. Her eyes burned too, but she let them trail down her expertly-powdered face, makeup be damned. She was vaguely aware of the onlookers, of the priest reading a sermon from his gilded Bible, of the best man giving the organist a side-eye that could melt glaciers, but she only saw her fiancé. Her almost-husband. The man who had stood by her when she lost her job. The one person who could make her laugh when she wanted nothing more than to cry. The man who ate her cooking even though her cuisine barely qualified as food..
If this wasn’t the time to cry tears of joy, then what was?
She heard sniffling from the pews. A small child’s voice asked her mother for chicken nuggets, who silenced her daughter with an embarrassed, “Shush!”
The ceremony proceeded as a standard wedding would if one ignored that the priest was reading the Bible with an iPhone 15 flashlight. When the priest gave the groom permission to kiss the bride, he happily obliged. As he swept his wife into his arms, the newlyweds’ shared smiles were so brilliant that they illuminated the darkened church like a lightning strike.
The rest of the wedding proved chaotic, but it was with the breed of chaos that complements a wedding instead of hinders it. Someone managed to get a backup generator to wheeze back to life, but it only produced a small amount of power. They could either turn the lights back on or redirect the electricity to their wedding DJ. Though no one said it aloud, the dim church made for a pleasant atmosphere. People seemed to speak more freely and be more themselves without a light to expose the nuances of expression. Tables boomed with conversation and chortled with laughter as the people ate, drank, and were merry with joy.
The newlyweds decided that music was more important. They tried to ignore the mother of the bride’s blistering stare. Not even the darkness could mask her fury.
The DJ, who had been struggling to get service for the last half hour and had resorted to opening and closing the Weather app out of boredom, beamed when his sound system blinked back on. With the flick of his wrist, the subwoofers boomed with bass, a female singer reverberated against the church columns, and the dance floor was alight.
Though the husband and wife didn’t join themselves (the groom was mortified of dancing as a concept, and the bride’s dancing after a few glasses of red wine was not … sophisticated), the groom’s party challenged each other to see who could perform “the worm” with the greatest level of superiority. After flopping around on the ground in time to a generic 2010s club song, the best man was declared the winner. Though the alcohol numbed the pain now, they would wake up with purple and green bruises painting their stomachs, as if they had collectively volunteered to be practice dummies for an MMA fighter. The best man would not feel like a winner then.
After the dance floor cleared out, the cake platter was picked clean, and the priest gave them several pointed looks to suggest that their allotted time was running short, the bride and groom sat in their car with “JUST MARRIED” smeared in white on the back windshield. They took a collective breath. Behind them, their friends and family cheered for their success and happiness, their jubilant noises fading as the groom swerved a corner and drove further and further away. With the car windows rolled down, the wind breezing through the bride’s curls, she took her husband’s hand and squeezed tight.
