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“Bridezilla,” like many of Fu’s stories, is a quirky, arresting narrative that explores human bonds ands find them lacking.
While Hollywood star Julia Roberts is famous for playing commitment-phobes in such classic capers as My Best Friend’s Wedding and The Runaway Bride, many of our gifted women writers also tap the ambivalence of characters on the cusp of unholy matrimony, as in Kim Fu’s recently published collection of short fiction, Lesser Known Monsters of the 21stCentury. Thirty-five years old, Fu has gained a passionate following for quirky, arresting narratives that explore human bonds and find them lacking. Born and raised in Vancouver to immigrants from Hong Kong, she now resides in Seattle; much of her work is set along the Pacific coast, sifting through webs of human and animal lives. In “Bridezilla,” excerpted exclusively in Oprah Daily, her protagonist, Leah, freezes up on her Big Day—she makes a dash for freedom only to succumb to a mystery as large as the world, caught among the tides and tang of salt air.
“She had once liked pretty things, the most basic of pretty things, the lingua franca of femininity: candles, mirrors, flowers, pastel colors,” Fu writes. “She’d once wanted to get married in a big white dress on a beach at sunset. She’d wanted four children and enough bedrooms to house them all. She wasn’t sure when that had changed, why all these things now struck her as grotesque and fetishistic.”
Fu’s first novel, For Today I Am a Boy, won the Edmund White Award for debut fiction, and her poetry collection, How Festive the Ambulance, and second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, garnered wide acclaim. Here’s a writer on the move—come for the thrift-store dress, stay for the shocking denouement. —Hamilton Cain, contributing editor
The first reports of the sea monster were broadcast the day Arthur proposed to Leah. News outlets put “sea monster” in quotation marks in headlines and chyrons, usually followed by a question mark.
Arthur and Leah were eating breakfast in a diner. CNN played on a TV on a high corner shelf, facing Leah. The most popular footage of the monster, taken on a phone by a commercial fisherman off the coast of Hawaii, had already played twice over the course of their meal. Technically, it was an amalgamation of brainless multicellular organisms—chemically linked, lurching as one. Yes, it was easy to confuse the thick, bonded chains for tentacular limbs, the greater central mass for a body, to imagine its twitching-nerve reactions as movement coordinated by a central mind, but the science assured otherwise. Yes, videos of it surfacing and splashing down like a whale—a slimy, eyeless, mottled neon orange and yellow whale—were alarming, but as far as anyone could tell, it was a harmless cannibal, consuming only the type of microscopic sea life of which it was composed. Digesting some, enveloping others. How does it choose, Leah wondered. How does it choose whether you get eaten or you join?
“We should get married,” Arthur said, mouth full of pancakes.
Leah put down her fork. “Why?”
“Because you want to,” he said.
“Oh, do I? And you don’t?”
“I don’t care either way. And if one of us really wants to do something, and the other is indifferent, we should do it.” He cut and speared another cross-section of his short stack. “Like if I really wanted pizza for dinner, and you were fine with anything, we would get pizza.”
“I’m not sure I want to get married if you think marriage is comparable to pizza.”
“Pizza is one of the great wonders of the universe,” Arthur replied, gravely. “And I want to be with you for the rest of our lives. It’s the bureaucracy that I’m indifferent to.”
“I’m not going to argue for it,” he said. “I just want you to know that if a wedding is something you want, I’m game.”
Leah stared past Arthur’s head, where the shaky video of the monster was playing for a third time. On-screen, a living island of sludge in vibrant, toxic colors rose from the sea. “How romantic,” she said.
Leah knew her friends despised weddings. Marriage was an archaic, unnecessary, patriarchal institution. They thought of themselves as free-love bohemians, despite having all ended up in monogamous, long-term, two-person partnerships, despite mostly working in corporate jobs and at universities. They thought weddings showed hubris, or cast a jinx, or were a desperate attempt to save a relationship that everyone knew was already failing. They thought this despite some of them actually being married: two married at city hall over a weekend without telling anyone, announcing it on Facebook on Monday morning, and another couple married in the garden of their ground-floor apartment with only their immediate families present. But each time a sibling or cousin or friend from college tied the knot, they crowed with horror over brunch: the wasted money, the gendered rituals, drunken toasts, hideous dresses, photo slideshows, adult women holding parasols, tiers of cupcakes. They would announce they had to go to a wedding or, worse yet, an engagement party, bridal shower, or bachelor/bachelorette party, with a gagging gesture, a kill-me throat-slash. “White people!” they’d laugh, despite—or because, Leah was never sure—the whole group being white themselves.
Leah looked in the windows of bridal stores, the mannequins invariably headless, golems for self-insertion. She was tall, lean, and blond, and it was easy to blur her reflection on the surface of the glass into the sweeping, regal dresses behind it. She felt drawn to the displays, repulsed by them, a magnet of changing poles. Weddings were obscene in any era, but especially in this one, a narcissistic spectacle at the end of the world.
Arthur listened to her change her mind every other day in his genial, even-keeled way, and continued to express no opinion. “If you want a wedding, let’s have a wedding,” he said. “If you don’t want a wedding, we don’t have to have one.” He was physically large, slow-moving, agreeable—a steady, mountain-like man. Her friends said they loved Arthur, they adored him, but they treated him like a piece of furniture or, at best, a beloved pet she brought everywhere. Everyone agreed he was good for her, a stabilizing force.
Leah had large blue eyes and an upturned nose. In her teens and twenties, she’d often been told she should have been a model or an actress. She’d never had any aspirations in these areas, but she still noted that people had stopped suggesting it. Her parents had been comfortably, upward-trending middle class, and were aging independently and without fuss. She’d gotten good grades and had been well-liked in school. She was lucky enough to share a co-op apartment with Arthur, while their friends moved farther and farther out into the suburbs. She had a coveted job writing reports and newsletters for a nonprofit with an absentminded billionaire’s wife at the top. She volunteered at her neighborhood food bank on the weekend, portioning dry goods from large sacks into small bags.
She had once liked pretty things, the most basic of pretty things, the lingua franca of femininity: candles, mirrors, flowers, pastel colors. She’d once wanted to get married in a big white dress on a beach at sunset. She’d wanted four children and enough bedrooms to house them all. She wasn’t sure when that had changed, why all these things now struck her as grotesque and fetishistic. She felt conscious of an army of twenty-two-year-olds at her back, with infinitely more energy and talent, who wouldn’t hesitate to kill for her apartment or job.
When Leah asked Arthur if he wanted children, he said, “I don’t know. Do you?”
“Do you think it’s immoral to have children now?”
But also: the sweet soft smell of an infant’s head, a toddler’s astonished shrieking laugh as their fingers grasped at the newness of anything, everything.
The day after the sea monster appeared on the other side of the world, four people were gunned down in a grocery store downtown. Three days later, a crane fell from a construction site during a windstorm and crushed two cars, and an embezzlement scandal involving three city council members came to light. This, of course, was only the local news.
“So let’s get married on a beach at sunset,” Arthur said.
Because they kept their windows closed all summer to keep out the wildfire smoke, the sun a defined red disk in the haze that gave everything a Martian glow. Because the waterfront homes in their city that used to be rented as wedding venues were being abandoned as uninsurable, prone to flooding, poised on eroding cliffsides. Because the ocean was now a noxious, primordial soup, spitting up monsters.
In a thrift store, on a rack of nightgowns, Leah found the dress: a white full-length slip, the hem just past her ankles, that fell straight down and made her look like a sliver of moonlight. She kept it in the back of her closet for months and told no one.
The monster created sound waves that confused the echolocation of other sea life, sent them chasing after imaginary prey. Scientists were quoted explaining that the synchronized vibrational movement of millions of tiny creatures was not “talking” or “singing,” as some reports had it—the conglomeration contained no structures capable of even rudimentary communication. The monster had first been pushed northwest, toward Japan, and was now rounding southwest again on the global currents, on an arc that bent toward Alaska and eventually California, projected to circle the Pacific Ocean indefinitely. It was still growing, but the latest science suggested that the nature of the bonds holding it together limited how large the monster could grow before breaking apart, crushed under its own weight. The world resigned to its existence, and it rarely made the news. Someone made an app that pinned the locations of confirmed sightings and projected the monster’s path, such that Leah could take out her phone and see approximately where it was in the world at any given moment.
Arthur found the harbor cruise. “It’s not the beach,” he said, “but it’s on the water.” The all-in-one package was three hours and up to twenty-five guests. If the weather was good, they’d be married on the deck by the captain, who was ordained by the Universal Life Church. Their guests would be served the dinner cruise dinner, choice of steak or pasta. The crew member who usually took group photos before boarding, hustling parties in front of a life-size backdrop of the very dock they stood on—except consistently lit, forever sunny, with the cruise company logo in the corner—would be their wedding photographer.
No fuss, no muss. Painless was the word that came to mind. Leah felt crushed by disappointment just looking at the website. “It’s perfect,” she said.
In the women’s washroom, which served as Leah’s bridal suite, she could feel the vibration of the boat’s engine when she leaned against the wall. The ocean had been visibly choppy that afternoon, and her stomach swayed along with the docked boat. She took yogic breaths. A potent mix of smells—sea, shit, diesel, hand soap—accompanied each inhale.
She longed for a full-length mirror. She looked ghastly in the strip mirror above the sinks. The woman she’d hired to do her hair and makeup had already left, so there was nothing to be done about the sharp borders between garish patches of color on her face. The pink eye shadow that had looked feminine and rosy on their trial day now looked like conjunctivitis, and the foundation was so thick and ill matched that her face seemed to hover in front of her head, like a mask made from a paper plate.
Leah’s mother fussed with the hem of her dress. “I just cannot get it to lie flat,” she said. “It keeps wrinkling.”
“You want it to look good in the pictures. Those pictures are forever.”
Unable to see herself below the shoulders, Leah fiddled with the too-long straps that made the neckline sit slack and precariously low across her chest, the bodice cupping her upper rib cage instead of her breasts. It occurred to her only now that the slip had probably been someone’s bridal lingerie, probably someone dead. She pictured their adult child emptying whole drawers into garbage bags. The dress had been so delicate she’d been afraid to wash it, and a musty smell lingered. Most likely, both bride and groom were dead now, the ghost of their wedding night consummation sunken into the fibers, along with whatever joy or pain it had heralded.
She batted her mother’s hands away from her own butt. “Mom, why don’t you go back out and greet people as they board?”
“I told you that you needed ushers. Everything is so disorganized.”
Because of the intermittent rain, the ceremony would be on the karaoke stage, hastily decorated in crepe paper streamers like a middle-school dance. The steaks were turning to leather under the galley heat lamps, the pasta congealing to a candy-red sludge.
“I want to talk to Arthur,” Leah said.
“You’re not supposed to see each other. Bad luck and all that.”
“I know, but—but he doesn’t care about that stuff.”
“He doesn’t care much about anything.”
“Mom.” Leah’s hands were cold and bloodless. She flexed her fingers. Her seasickness was worsening. “I need to get some air.”
“You’re just going to go out there? Before the ceremony?”
“Because you’re supposed to make an entrance,” her mother said. “Also, the rain will ruin your makeup.”
Too late for that, she thought. “I’ll be quick.”
As soon as she ducked out the restroom door, she saw that nearly everyone had gathered on the outside upper deck to take pictures of the city skyline, about to recede and widen behind them as the boat left dock. The rain had just stopped, the sun peeking through a tear in the quilted gray sky. Only Leah’s uncle Sven and Arthur’s youngest sister, Jenny, remained inside, talking near the base of the stairs. Sven had his hand on the wall above Jenny’s head, Jenny being sixteen and almost a full foot shorter than him, his body tented over hers.
She saw her friends’ backs through the windows, their craning arms, phones lifted like offerings. They were laughing at something. Her, surely. Despite her efforts to keep everything casual and low-key, she still felt silly, nakedly hungry for attention, like a child in a cardboard birthday crown. She saw Arthur in his rented tuxedo, the pants too short and the jacket straining against the bulk of his upper body. The man she loved, the last man she would ever love. The hunch of his back, the shape of diminished dreams. Ungenerous thoughts pressed against the back of her eyes.
Rather than brave the crowd, Leah went out the door they’d boarded through, which led to the enclosed side deck. She immediately felt better. The air was damp and cold, June dressed as February.
A crewman worked to detach the gangway. He was handsome, she thought, dark with close-cropped hair, attractive even in a neon visibility vest and navy coveralls. The sight of the only exit closing, the only connection to land being severed, sent a bolt of panic through her limbs.
Her muscles suddenly taut and primed, she ran down the ramp in her sandals, their flat bottoms slick against the wet rubber. The crewman hardly looked up as she flashed by. Something dawned slowly in his face as he tossed the ropes to the other crew member on the dock, as the ramp raised and tucked neatly into its horizontal resting place, as a triumphant horn blasted over the roar of the engines, the gap between the dock and the boat widening, at first only by inches.
Leah stood on the other side.
They stared at each other. She could read his lips, clear as day: Oh shit.
He leaned over the railing as the boat continued to drift away. He tilted his head and gestured toward the door with his chin. Something like: Did you mean to do that? Should I get them to stop this thing?
She raised a finger to her lips. Shh.
She could tell by his eyes and the shape of his mouth that he was laughing.
The crewman on the dock gaped at her. “Oh shit,” he echoed. He was handsome too, in a different way—scruffy and windburned, long hair tucked against his neck by a gray ski hat.
The boat’s path would curve right as it left the harbor and soon all the guests would see her from the rear deck, shivering on land in her nightgown-dress. Some part of her believed she could avoid disaster if she just stayed out of sight.
She ran along the boardwalk and ducked down the first set of stairs she came across, which led down to the water. The small beach had always been unpopular because of the reek of the water treatment output pipe and, more recently, the added smell of rotting seaweed and shellfish.
The only person on the rocky sand played with his dog near the sign that indicated dogs were forbidden on city beaches. He threw a ball and his shorthaired mutt launched itself into the frigid Pacific to retrieve it over and over. The water was a strange color, swamp green with a reddish tint at the horizon line.
The rain began again, a light touch dotting her dress, deflating Leah’s absurd, puffed-up hair. The man with the dog glanced back at her between throws. The wind blew out her skirt like a sail, and she felt like an apparition come to haunt him, a flickering white flame rising up from the sand. She felt her makeup starting to run down her face like the shift before a landslide, a plane of solid ground liquefying.
“Oh shit,” she said aloud.
Until this moment, her mind had jumped ahead to returning to their apartment, hopping in a hot shower, baking a frozen pizza. Like Arthur would be there, as he always had. Her sweet, dependable Arthur, who never complained about anything. Like she’d be able to explain it to him—they were raising the gangway and I just felt—I had to—everything was so ugly and wrong—
Even Arthur couldn’t forgive the humiliation of the boat entering the bay with no bride. The confusion of the guests. Searching the ship for her, thinking there was nowhere for her to have gone. Her mother, smug and unsurprised. Would they think she fell overboard? Tipped over the railing in a fit of nerves and champagne? When would the laughing crewman reveal what he’d seen? How difficult was it to turn around that slow, wide vessel?
The dog was oblivious to Leah, the rain, his owner’s growing discomfort, and even the terrible, seductive smells of the beach. His world consisted entirely of the ball, its high arc through the sky, tiny splash, buoyant resurfacing. He returned the ball to his owner without enticement, and the man had a good throwing arm, pitching it fast and far each time.
Eventually, the owner called, “Okay, Hammy, time to go,” and the dog stopped abruptly, some distance away, ball in mouth. After a moment of contemplation, Hammy trotted over to Leah. He sniffed her exposed feet, then lifted his nose from her calves to her crotch, streaking filth from his snout along the white skirt.
“Hello,” she murmured. She reached to pet him. He pressed his body against her legs through the long skirt, his wagging tail throwing seawater into her face. The ball forced his mouth into the shape of a clown’s painted smile.
“Hammy!” The owner ran toward them.
She squatted down. Hammy jumped up in response, clumps of wet sand falling down the front of her dress. She embraced him, and he submitted, his chaotic energy bound in her arms, his whole back half swinging metronomically.
The owner had reached them. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
She could tell, from his hesitancy, that she looked like a madwoman in her soaked dress and sloughed-off makeup. She smiled down at the distinct pawprints Hammy had left among the continents of mud and dirt.
“Your dress is ruined,” he said, his tone accusatory.
“It was already ruined,” she said. As she released the dog, he spat the ball directly into her hands, which cupped to catch it.
She reared back and threw. She was surprised at her own power, how long the ball seemed to be airborne, its long trajectory over the ocean. In the thickening rain, the wind picking up and tossing grit in her eyes, she couldn’t quite make out where it hit the water. The dog barreled back into the ocean. They watched him swim, his floppy-eared head shrinking with distance.
“Hammy, that’s too far,” the owner called. “Hammy! Come back now! Hammy, come! Come, Hammy!”
Leah could just make out the dog’s muzzle, pointed upward, turn back toward them. The rain fell harder.
The dog’s head disappeared under the opaque water.
The two of them ran toward the ocean. The man was faster, Leah’s stride constricted by her long, drenched skirt. He stopped at the shoreline. Leah kicked off her sandals. The too-long straps slipped easily off her shoulders. She stepped out of the puddle of dress at her feet.
Waves knocked her to her knees as she waded in. She hadn’t swum in the ocean since she was a child. As she found her stroke, the water seemed more resistant than she remembered, her body more buoyant, like swimming in gelatin. The rotten-fish-and-gasoline smell that had been embedded in her sinuses since the harbor cruise now flooded her brain. When she opened her eyes under the water, they burned. She could see nothing.
The soupy water forced her to the surface, bursting through clots of seaweed. She felt the stringy plant life draping her shoulders, clinging to her treading limbs. She couldn’t see the dog anywhere.
She’d thrown the ball.
She’d abandoned Arthur at the altar.
The beach and the figure of the dog’s owner seemed impossibly far, much farther away than she could have swum in that time. Yet her toes grazed solid ground. She could stand, between being thrown off her feet by the current. But even as she stood, she saw the shoreline vanishing, the abyss of ocean growing between her and the city.
She tried to make sense of what she was seeing, her eyes still stinging. Through the dark murk, she didn’t seem to be standing on the ocean’s bottom but on a moving, shifting surface, propelling farther out to sea. A warm current swirled around her, like a hot water tap streaming into a cold bath. She struggled against the seaweed still wrapped around her arms and neck and waist, dangling from her ankles. She tried to swipe the seawater from her eyes.
The seaweed was neon orange.
She twisted around, entangling herself further. She finally spotted a furry blotch floating on a patch of neon yellow slime, under a lattice of slick, luminescent yellow ribbons. Hammy.
She felt herself trembling, her skin prickling, her heart shaking out of rhythm. Her whole body was vibrating, resonating like a struck string. She thought of Arthur. She pictured him at the tuxedo-rental shop, squeezed into the too-small suit, not wanting to contradict the salesperson, not wanting to trouble them, wanting to make them happy. The way he always wanted to make Leah happy.
The orange and yellow slime gathered to her, suckered to her flesh, pulled her apart. The image of Arthur slipped away. The approval of her friends, what she wanted, what she told herself she didn’t want. Her everlasting importance. She understood, for just a breath, the ecosystem of her body, all the creatures she housed on her skin, in her hair, in her intestines, all her wants and dreams and loves as stimulus and meat, fragile and dependent on every other life. She readied herself to join an ancient, unstoppable mind.
Kim Fu is the author of the short story collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. Her novel For Today I Am a Boy, winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards. Fu’s writing has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Hazlitt, and The TLS. She lives in Seattle.
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