Black Snow

The white dress hugs her tightly, her breath shallow as a baby bird's. She moves forward but something is wrong; at her feet lies scattered money. Thousands upon thousands of sketchy green presidents stare up at her as she grips her lillies, shuffles through the flimsy paper sea. It is a tragic waste. Someone should have told her money can't buy love.
They wait for her now on the other side of the stone walls, and they watch her when the doors swing open, rows of blurred smiles, faceless bodies. The organ plays in time with her first step into hell.
"One, two, sway to the macabre rhythm."
It beats whispers into her blood, "The end now is nigh, turn back to save your life."
Blinded by a lightening flash she expects to hear the dooming crack of thunder. She realizes it's only the photographer, begging for her plastic smile, hiding behind his own dead eyes. His job has made him privy to sad secrets. He knows the real end to this beginning.
The sweet baritone of the man whose arm she grips vice-like murmurs incoherently, like the babble of a brook as it smooths away granite, wears the rocks to weakness.
"Daddy, save me!" But no, not out loud, this is only in her mind, and the quiet words still try to soften her hard defense.
Another step and her arm grows heavy, third finger, left hand weighed suddenly with a diamond padlock and she chokes in fear to discover the key she once wore around her neck is turned to dust.
Her steps turn leaden, but Father pulls her forward to the end, to another faceless blur. Except for his eyes. Obsidian, they bear into her, needles on her skin, but Father doesn't see. His kiss upon her cheek is like a teardrop, there and gone, eternity ever after changed with a brush of pale pink lips.
The one with the black eyes takes her hand, cold iron shackles disguised as fingers and no matter how she inconspicuously tries to relieve the burning in her bones, he releases not his grip.
Now before the minister, he hums in his drolling tone what must be the vows, though the words are different than she remembers.
"Repeat, repeat, die or retreat," fall faster and faster to the now-shifting ground below. She is alone with the Iron Man, red desert on all sides, sun high, death nigh, the way the whispers promised.
A child's laughter crackles on the air and in the distance a small girl stands, chained, the metal raw on her dainty skin.
"Who is she?" echoes off the indigo sky until the sharp clink of steel sounds and she sees the chain is hooked to the heavy padlock adorning her hand. Out of the child's mouth suddenly flies a calendar bigger than the noon-day sun. Details are scrawled illegibly across every single date, "Infinity" stamped where once the month appeared.
She looks to the man with her for explanation but sees only boredom in his listless gaze. He seems to look right through her and yet somewhere deep inside she knows he must have loved her long ago, when the Paris river caught the moon and chocolate still stained her lips. He is fading before her very eyes, and even while she wonders why she reaches for him. But it is too late.
Gone are the man and the child and the desert, the maid alone on a canyon's precipice, waving goodbye to the ship that holds her dreams as it sails on the wind. She is left with only her tears, poisoned rivulets running down the snow of her dress, blackness in their wake.

Saffron sun showers her room with golden glitter as the light peeks through the leaves of the wind-blown oak tree.
She awakens.

It is the dawn of her wedding day.