Wedding Dress
Written by Naeun Lee
Illustrated by Seoyeong Heo
The door opens slowly with a squeaky noise. From a chink in the door, a man appears, taking a step
towards inside. He walks into the empty, hollow room where the white pills are scattered on its floor.
He recognizes the mannequin placed on the very center. The man slowly approaches to the figure and
slowly starts rotating around the mannequin. He views it from every direction, not even letting an
image escaping from his mind. Mannequin’s body and face resemble a beautiful female. She has pair
of green-gray eyes, long eyelashes, long wavy brown hair, sharp nose, and thin lips; she would have
been one of the most beautiful and elegant woman if she were alive. Before anything, anyone who
saw her would admit her breathtaking beauty not only because of her appearance but also because of
her white wedding dress, which seems to be the most exquisite piece that a dress designer can create.
Examining the perfect figure with full of adoration, a man continues to move around the room.
The man couldn’t forget the day that he stepped into the empty house, detected the small piece
of paper lying on the table. As he read down the tiny handwritten sentences, his smile gradually disappeared and puzzled look appeared in the place instead. Charming girl who had ran out and hugged
him every day when he came back home was nowhere to be seen, and he recognized, all of a sudden,
that she, his beloved fiancée, has abandoned him completely, and ran away to her dear sweetheart that
the man didn’t even know the existence.
And that very day, he recalled, was the day that he had decided to propose to her.
He was holding a huge gift box in his hand, and when his hands started to shake madly after
reading through the short goodbye letter, the box fell to the cold floor with a dull thud. From the box,
the shiny ring showed up first, rolled through the floor, and the snow-white wedding dress fell out.
The dress was the masterpiece that the man spent several years to design and make, only for his beloved fiancée. Leaving those cherished materials abandoned on the cold floor, he staggered and fell to
his knees in spite of himself. How much have he loved and adored her for last several years, and how
happy was he those days! He had undoubtedly believed that she also loved him as much as he loved
her, and also undoubtedly assured that she would accept the proposal. And she, the one who he had
trusted the most, had betrayed him. She had ruined his plan, ruined his life, and ruined his future.
Just before he ripped off his masterpiece of anger, he abruptly stopped, with his eyes wide open and
face red-hot with anger, and started to think.
I do not want her to leave me. I wouldn’t let her go. She must not run away from me. Because
I love her, because I love her so much that I cannot possibly live without her. Since she is my darling,
she cannot go away from me. Never.
No one except her can wear my dress, and if she wears it, I, who loves her the most, should be
her partner. No one else can.
The man, still in the room, keeps on staring at the mannequin that looks astonishingly similar
to his fiancée. She is wearing a snow-white wedding dress that is glimmering in the sole moonlight,
coming from the only window in the room. Her vacant eyes are staring to the window as if she
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