POSTMARKED BALTIMORE, Excerpt

As the months passed, though, his feelings mutated. It was odd, even Father Burns acknowledged, that the more he worked with the couple leading up to their wedding day, the more they started to resemble him and Noel. It wasn’t so much a physical thing as it was an intrinsic quality in the two that moved them toward each other even when they were moving away. It was how he and Noel had been. The flutter of the girl’s eyes, the youthful flirting of the boy, it was all the little things that made love perfect. Such a bitter pill, jagged and exact in its scrape, only sharpened the more he watched them. There were moments when he couldn’t wait to see the couple because remembering wasn’t so bad; there were also times when he couldn’t wait for the wedding to be over. Remembering fond times usually brings sweet nostalgia to the normal man; for Father Burns, though, remembering could be like fingernails across a chalkboard. In a matter of weeks what he had worked so hard for years to erase was materializing again in the form of one woman’s name. And the chalk kept writing it over and over again on the chalkboard.

"I’ve learned my lesson," he said to himself, still staring at the letter, trying to believe against all sobriety that the letter in front of him wasn’t postmarked Baltimore.