Entry #150

Toasting to a Fresh Start
by Esther Avila


April looked around her new bedroom. It was perfect.

“Everything had to be white. That’s what I told him,” she told her best friend Nicky as she let herself fall on top of the white down’s comforter on her white wrought iron bed.

Across the small room, lit candles reflected two sad faces off the mirror of a white dresser.

“I still can’t believe you said yes? You don’t love him,” Nicky said. “It’s not too late. Call your parents. Tell them you want to go home.”

“I have no family,” April answered quietly as she looked at long-stem white roses adorning the bedside table. “They threw me out. He saved me. I owe him this.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to marry him.”

Nicky tried to talk some last minute sense into her friend. In a few hours it would be too late. The wedding was scheduled for morning.

April looked at her maid of honor – her only real friend – the only person who really knew her.

Removing a bottle of wine from under the bed, April poured red wine into a single goblet.

“Some things have to be red,” April said, sharing the wine with Nicky who sobbed quietly.

“Don’t cry, my love. I’m not going to marry Jack,” April said, brushing her wine-tasting, arsenic-covered lips against Nicky’s. “Don’t be scared. In vino veritas. No one can ever separate us again.”