The 10 Bridesmaids

• Elizabeth Drinnan, Grade 8
• Short Story
• 2015

It was 10:00 at night and I was getting sleepy. I shut the front door and went out the back of my oil shop to get the keys to lock the front door. I came back out to see five young girls in bridesmaid dresses all knocking and hesitating, some were even crying! They all saw me and went crazy, they begged me to let them in. “We need oil for our lamps, we need it quick before the groom from the wedding we had earlier returns!” They hastily screamed at me, but I was tired and I didn’t want to get the boxes of oil I packed up 15 minutes ago out again, and they would take forever trying to find the ‘right’ oil for their lamps, so I said, “We are closed, go away, come back tomorrow!” But they wouldn’t go away so I gave up and let them in. They rushed around the back of my shop into the storage room like five speeding eagles learning to fly. They chucked the boxes off the shelf and took the oil that they could find and rushed up to the counter. I asked, “Why do you need oil at this time of night?” They replied, “Well, we were waiting for the groom to arrive at his wedding reception so we left an hour early to greet the groom but our eyes drew heavy and we had gotten up really early to get ready for the wedding so we fell asleep. We must have been asleep for hours because it was dark by the time we woke to bursting sounds of the horns. “The groom is coming, make way for him, light your lamps and let him pass!” the people leading said. It was around 10pm by now and we had no oil left for our lamps but the other five bridesmaids did, they had brought extra. We asked for just a bit but they wouldn’t share with us so we raced as fast as we could to your shop.
I looked at them clueless, they had spoken so fast that it didn’t really make sense. I heard they were in a rush so I quickly gave them their change and they ran out of my shop. I cleaned up their mess that they made out of my oils, locked the door and headed home to go to sleep. The next morning I woke up to a ‘thud’ on my door. I got dressed and opened the door to see who it was but is was just the paper, It was 8:00 on a Sunday morning. I took it inside and looked at the front, ‘Wedding –missing five’ it read, I scanned it a bit more, ‘Five bridesmaids went missing after the groom showed up late by six hours... They were found begging to get into the church but they were refused as strangers’. I then thought that those five bridesmaids must be the five who were rejected, so they were late for the reception and they should have brought the extra oil from me before they went to the church like the smarter five girls did.