Exercise 1: Wedding Picture

Wedding Picture

Their hands joined together in the simple task of cutting the pearly white frosted cake. But he took her hands in for more than the cutting of the cake, it would be forever. Her hands cold in his hot ones, as he gives the camera a nervous smile. Far from home, and with a family that just recently became his own. He is home sick and stays close to the one he loves. His movements anxious and his body language is riddled with nerves but the softness of her skin keeps him grounded.
Her cheeks blush as the others go in for the next picture, and with no idea how beautiful she really is. She leans into his body for strength and has no clue that he is strengthened by her touch. She’s ready for this family and all that it means to her. A family of her own. Young but sure of herself, or not quite as sure as she thinks she is. Her senses are dulled by a calm that keeps her level and not in tears, keeps her by his side, where she really wishes to be.
A long way from home, the both of them spends their weekend in Vegas with love in their hearts. A love that they aren’t even completely sure of yet. Something that will have a bumpy road, and will take both striding for the goal… to make it to the two year mark.

The Wedding Picture exercise

-~-Exercise-~-

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