A wedding in the sky - Short Story

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Michael Klein

Summers are bright with nostalgia and beach roses. Heat makes the mind and the flowers expand. And in Provincetown, famous, frivolous summer is still bright at dusk in empty parking lots with men like John who fall in love with their best friend and turn to someone, like me, to say what they can't just come out and say to the person they've fallen for.

Because the sense of being with a specific man still appeals to me--and especially in summer--I'd consider a marriage. But is there a way to transpose that unearthly music of first love into a present key? Can one simply add more music to the score--the way you fasten that preposterous tail, like the end of a joke, onto the end of a kite? The kite looks beautiful as it airstreams up and away into memory--something different than what it was before you let it go. And you're left with a string, which has to be enough to keep the kite on course in the terrifying (because it is such an endless blue) blue sky.

Michael Klein's books are 1990 and Track Conditions: A Memoir. He teaches in the MFA program at Goddard College in Vermont.