The Wedding Picture exercise can be an evocative one-page fiction assignment. The exercise is to ask students to color copy their own wedding photograph, that of their parents, or an anonymous wedding picture, and to write a one-page fiction inspired by the image, with "Wedding Picture" as an example. My classes have sometimes made their "Wedding Picture" exercises into chapbooks entitled "Class Pictures."
by: Jayne Anne Phillips
-Example-:
Wedding Picture
My mother's ankles curve from the hem of the white suit as if the bones were water. Under the cloth her body in its olive skin unfolds. The black hair, the porcelain neck, the red mouth that barely shows its teeth. My mother's eyes are round and wide as a light behind her skin burns them to coals. Her heart makes a sound that no one hears. The sound says each fetus floats, an island in the womb.
My father stands beside her in his brown suit and two-tone shoes. He stands also by the plane in New Guinea in 1944. On its side there is a girl on a swing wearing spike heels and short shorts. Her breasts balloon; the sky opens inside them. Yellow hair smooth as a cats, she is swinging out to him. He glimmers, blinded by the light. Now his big fingers curl inward. He is trying to hold something.
In her hands the snowy Bible hums, nuns swarming a honeyed cell. The husband is an after thought. Five years since the high school lover crumpled on the bathroom floor, his sweet heart raw. She's twenty-three, her mother's sick, it's time. My father's heart pounds, a bell in a wrestler's chest. He is almost forty and the lilies are trumpeting. Rising from his shoulders, the cross grows pale and loses its arms in their heads.
by: Jayne Anne Phillips
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