Not much can be said for ol’ Tanner O’Malley. Aside from the fact that he wore a nice coat. Long and grey, with seven buttons up the middle. Sensible pockets that fastened and zipped. Even one on the inside, the kind to hide a map, with a pouch inside of that, to hide a treasure’s key. The collar was built to accentuate the cheekbones, its angles mysterious like Atlantis magicians. Opposite that collar, a custom-split tail. For a wider range of mobility than one would ever need.
I know it as the coat that brought Tanner his wife, whose charm and whose beauty was the prolix talk of fairytales.
She spotted it one day while he was out for a walk, through the window of a rental across the street from her church.
Every morning through that window, in a steaming soak of suds, she’d watch the sunrise as it climbed up the steeple and bombarded with blessings her most bona fide parts. Though that window had a curtain, it was seldom that she pulled it, and the window she left open for the steam to roll outside. She liked to stand their for moment and inhale the fresh air while clearing fog from the panes of both the window and her dreams.
And through those very panes is how Tanner first appeared, collecting litter from the church’s rainy-day flooded grounds, singing hymns like an angel taking care of the world.
In any other coat he would have caught the pneumonia, and accepted her sympathy along with her tea. But, “Oh no, ” said Tanner, rolling up his fancy pants to wade through a puddle for an empty plastic bag. “You’d be hard-pressed to catch a cold with this quality.” Then he went on at length about its waterproofed layers and how tornadoes were no match for its windbreaking shell.
Awfully impressed and halfway in love, with Tanner’s next words, she knew she’d found the One. “How about I walk you home and let you try it on?”
Two months later– A lavishly magical wedding. At the church where they met, with families flown in, the preparations alone would have cost a king his crown. They’d even trained doves to bear both their rings and coast in from the sun as it set down the steeple.
The picture-perfect proceeding went according to plan until Tanner discovered he was absent one detail. His bride had assumed that marriage meant equal, and the coat from vows-on would belong to them both. So it was unbeknownst to Tanner that a wardrobe exchange had been planned with I-Do’s, and it was much to his surprise that she had really strong hands.
“Easy, pumpersnickle. What’s with all the tugging? I know the fabric’s wrinkle-free, but you’re acting like a savage.”
This marked the only time his bride was seen pouting. “Tanner O’Malley, you wore it down the aisle, I want to wear it back!”
Pain flooded Tanner in the form of realization: They hadn’t yet taken one unionized step and she’d already regressed into a Stone Age barbarian.
“But baby,” he said, “I need it for the pictures–to accentuate my cheekbones. Now take your hands off before I punch you in the face.”
They stood there a moment, their fresh marriage frozen, dead on the alter, the bible still warm–and then up came the knee, garter-belting his manlies, with just enough fuss to make the audience erupt.
Shaking their fists, they egged them both on.
Tanner, doubled-over, rolled up his jacket’s cuffs–which were perfect in circumference, an afterthought from Italy–and sank a mouthful of teeth into a stocking thigh-high.
This merited from the crowd the most thunderous applause, and the fury that followed was not regulation.
She cupped his ears, he gouged her eyes, and they brawled from the alter their way back up the aisle with His and Hers spectators standing on chairs–they were fast-pitching rice like enemy combatants–the confetti cannon was emptied and reloaded with silverware…
Never before had a post-nuptial war publicly garnered such toxic attention. Friends were calling friends. Families called extendeds. The minister called the cops–who called for all to freeze.
When freeze they finally did, almost everything went silent. Save for the sound of two lover doves, singing to the tune of Happily Married.
The butterflies heard it and danced in on their song. Then, almost as if they knew what was needed, they landed gently on the rings of now husband-and-wife.
Ooh’s and ah’s from the crowd laid a blanket for the newlyweds, who were again finding each other for the very first time.
They remembered together how they met and fell in love:
Her glance through the window at a trash-picking angel–his servicing the church, singing songs in the rain–the offer of tea, returned with a coat–its luxurious pockets, for a treasure map and key . . .
With his heart sailing off on the swells in eyes, Tanner popped up his collar like an agent of romance, swooped his bride off her feet the way good husband does, and took her to China with a Tiananmen Suplex the way you’d expect from a Communist red.
The bride and the crowd were both caught by surprise, for the unsportsmanlike move was long banned as “too deadly.”
But Tanner O’Malley was lost beyond rage–and this wasn’t the time to be playing by rules. No. This was the time for Old Testament fire and brimstone: This was the time for the Olfactory Slipknot. And that’s what he gave her, as a gentleman would…
It was noon the next day before the melee had stopped, the church no longer standing–one big, smoking hole.
And not a trace could be found of the beautiful proceeding, the people who attended, or much of the town.
Just a few loveable creatures that came in from the woodlands, possessed as new vessels by yester-raised demons–tasked with obtaining the fabric that danced away with the breeze after parting the bloody mist of a matrimonial séance without brandishing so much as a blemish or stain.