Snuggled up to the doors, in a church narrowly below the equator, was a halo of
bougainvilleas, in babydoll pink and sickly magenta– though Mari wouldn’t go on to
learn their actual name until much later, when the first whispers of a true winter
abroad started nipping at her fingers and no such thing as the color of a
bougainvillea existed for miles. Barely even a flower, she figured, its faces littered
with sharp veins to be lightly caressed by the rainbow, as if that would let it reach
any degree of what it means to be desired.

 

It’s in that breath of solitude, after the luncheon with the bridesmaids and all the
dolling up in the cabin, that Mari’s eyes start to water. Her father chose against
having someone’s nephew toddle across the red sea of the worship room; she's the
one entrusted with the rings instead, in all her clammy-palmed, over-blushed
twenty-year-old detail. The wooden box threatens to slip out of her hands– and
wouldn’t that be funny? If she did drop it, and the glittering rock found roots
amongst the mud, and the rage of all the sepia-toned retinue befell upon her like last
night’s rain– cold in its gentleness, eroding the hill in all its slow trickles. Her lashes
are about to fly off as she keeps on blinking, and the pastor catches her eye through
the window. He waves, the pits of his suit sweat through and his satin tie tight under
his Adam’s apple, and Mari has to wave back. In the time she was away, she wonders
if her father ever found true comfort in his word, if he ever sought him out when the
hold of faith wavered like he alleges it never did.

 

On one of last year’s Sundays, just a week before leaving the country for good, Mari
was somehow ushered past auditorium halls and into a painfully nondescript office.
Folding chairs, greige walls, populated by a water cooler and Jesus Christ hung on
the wall. The pastor put a hand on Mari’s neck and the other on his bible, and soon
enough thunder rolled off his lips and into the echoing room, an uneasy symphony
complemented by the humming of the AC. Amidst the impassioned prayer, pleading
for safe travels and eternal protection and the certainty that the illness that carved
out in the past remain as remains, pleading for the cleanliness of the new chapter
ahead and of the new body she was about to inherit.

 

If she looks down at herself, through the gap left between the fabric of the dress and
her pulsating chest, the scar greets her. It severs her body in pretty halves, and the
bit that pokes through the waistline up to her underbreast remains flushed with
irritation. Three-hundred and twenty-six days have passed and that bit still pulsed

with blood flow, healed wrong from bra use. It’s not that she was inclined to stop, as
the scar would very much remain the same, and it’s not that she expected to not see
it there, as the neckline of the dress was just fixed and tightened that morning. Mari
shifts in place again, still blinking, and for a second she worries her hands will
somehow soak through the wood of the box.

 

Her father waited by the altar, weathered and balding, looking ruddy beyond
comprehension by anyone who didn’t share his last name. Mari could see him
shifting in place as well, either balancing on the balls of his feet or fiddling with the
edge of the cummerbund. He looked like a penguin of sorts, not like a fifty year old
partaking in a miracle around those parts of the globe: marrying again. The day prior
he’d picked up Mari from the airport, some audiobook on discipline percolating
through the car radio, and he’d asked her how she was doing and how the weather
was ‘up there.’ Once the jetlag wore off Mari told him of the leaves in autumn and of
the snow in winter, of the readings she skimmed through and the textbooks she
bought. At some tiled coffee shop someone baptized her order as that of ‘Mareloose’
and so she thought that was a good story to bring up during the questionnaire. He
laughed in that tightlipped way of his, just after he told Mari there'd be no bachelor
party, then said, “All the Mariluzes I’ve met have been something special”.

 

Soon enough the bridal party started trickling in– rhinestoned-flower girls, perfumed
bridesmaids, gelled-back groomsmen. Mari stood sandwiched between the smells of
vanilla and sweat, and once she reached the mouth of the church, she put her heel
forward.

 

Mari was able stop incessantly blinking sometime in the middle of the ceremony. The
rings managed to make it safe down the aisle, and her father was at last knighted by
the glossy kiss of the bride. The pastor must’ve remembered Mari’s scene out on the
yard, because she could feel his gaze lingering on her during the initial sermon. She
brushed it off, pushing back her shoulders as she took in the blur of the vows. Her
father’s pen was never all that impressive, something he would joke about when she
told him of her work for the college paper, but it satiated the room in that moment,
and that seemed to be enough for both the bride and groom.

 

The reception was casual. Rain began to patter at the windows of the dining hall
again, but guests paid it no mind. Mari lightly swayed the juice in her cup, letting it
circle within itself and coat the sides of the glass in ways wine didn’t. Guests would
come to her in spurts– old churchgoers telling her back stories of when she used to
be this little, old friends asking what it’s like in the outside world, old ladies looking for
gossip on her stepmother. Mari could only offer concrete answers for the last– her
stepmother was, above all else, saintly. She floated around the room in a cloud of

shimmering tulle, hair curled in waves crashing on the shore of her neckline, still
gracious enough to find charm in her husband’s ruddy demeanor. If Mari was only a
little more apt, a little more God-fearing and a little more devilish, she would’ve told
her all she needed to hear before saying ‘yes’.

 

Somewhere in the middle of the night, faux-champagne flowing amongst the chiffon
pool of guests, one of the flower girls started tugging at the skirt of Mari’s dress. Not
much older than six, Mari remembered how she cried back in the cabin when they
tried to blow out her hair, then cried again when they arranged the curls into an up-
do, tiara-punctuated and all. During the luncheon she’d pointed Mari’s way and said
she looked like an American actress, someone with symmetrical halves and long hair.
The girl's father, mild-mannered and flustered, said the girl left her crayons back at
the cabin. Mari agreed to guide them back, picking up the drapes of her skirt as her
heels dug into the mud of the hill. It was a short walk– the wood panelling still had
that distinct salon smell clinging to it, a glittery dance of chemical tang, as if the
earlier rituals would take a while to be forgotten. The flower girl found whatever
needed to be found, and changed from her Sunday Best shoes to kiddish slippers
made of some neon foam she’ll surely grow out of by the following year. The father
just thanked her, looking into her eyes with that telltale look, and asked her how
school was going on the way back.

 

Mari couldn’t give him a proper answer. Just earlier that month the first whispers of
the first true winter she ever experienced were nipping at her fingers, on a busy
downtown street of lovers and Christmas shoppers so foreign to the motherland, and
now she was back on Earth, this eroding Earth of churchgoers and choked weddings
– motherless, tongue bruised, scar pulsing.

 

And that’s the thing– she’ll go back abroad, miles away from the equator, draft
stories to answer that very prompt, and try to not remember this place; how the
leaves squirm in the white-hot splendor of sunlight, or how the grit of the every-day
sweat soaked through all crevices, all sense split by heat. And she could change her
name to something less pressurized, less loaded with the ammunition of heritage,
something pretty and easy to pronounce when you couldn’t roll your R’s and
couldn’t, wouldn’t, move on. She could very well do all the things everyone else did to
preserve their contract to that square of dappled blue above them, but it would
never feel like it could ever be permanent or ensure that the scar would one day stop
pulsing.

 

“It’s been fun,” Mari said, and the flower girl took her father's hand on the trek back,
the reception hall looking like nothing more than a square of orange light from where
they stood among the green. The church bougainvilleas kept up their hold over the
cobblestone, veins pulsing, dew cold.