Five Stories on a Summer Night: Chapter V of When the Dogwood Blooms

The first of the five related tales in Five Stories on a Summer Night, Chapter V of When the Dogwood Blooms, is a narration by one of two bridesmaids at a June wedding in San Diego, that begins with:

"A cool, light ocean drizzle, blown in from the bay, had given the streets a shiny sheen, as Gloria and I rode in a yellow taxi, away from the downtown cathedral. It was the first weekend of June. We had been bride's maids at the wedding of our friend Maria. It was almost 10:00 PM when we left the wedding reception, which previously had a few hundred attendees, in the expansive banquet hall of the cathedral downtown. There were only a few dozen celebrants left, when we kissed goodbye to Maria and her new husband Thomas."

This narration is followed by the horror story that Ray distributed to the creative writing class in which Stepanie read her story. Though she criticized him for the contrived nature of his story about sharks, this three-layered tale nevertheless begins:

"It was Tuesday afternoon, though the Moody Blues Days of Future Past wasn't on the soundtrack of the shark exhibition. In the sleepless blue, yellow, and grey eyes of the primeval beasts, nonetheless, was a heartlessness common to all such self-dedicated and fin-endangered species, thought Edgar. He stared morosely at the multiple species of sharks, circling endlessly, like tropical good-luck fish in an 80-gallon tank in the lobby of a Chinese food restaurant. As intended, loud action-packed movie background music provided an eerily echoing accompaniment to the shifting shadows on the concrete walls of the exhibition hall. Most of these oversized fish were snout-nosed. All had the emotionless glare of a heartless killer, more singular than the wide-eyed, senile, or suffocating, look of a tuna or trout, spread-eagled on a boat deck, or pier planks. On the multi-layered glass, Edgar saw his reflection, hazel-eyed, with sandy brown hair. There was nothing in his appearance that might have warranted an extra look from a female of his species, that might have been rated a nine or ten in looks, he thought. Since he was not a guitar-strumming or keyboard-tickling singer, perhaps his only feature that might have elicited a bar room second look was the intensity in his deep-set eyes. These eyes were shrouded by scowling brows, on which the blond hair was so light, without a closer look, one might have thought there were no such brows."