After the jacket massacre had been patched up with three safety pins and a heroic amount of duct tape, Lukas called for the “gift opening”. We sat on our throne of Euro pallets, Mia in her crumpled tulle and me with a back that felt like it had survived a close encounter with an industrial shredder.
“Before we move on to the… uh… liquid tokens of appreciation,” Lukas announced, waving a letter opener around, “we have one very special highlight! Beate?”
Mia’s mum stepped forward, her eyes still red from the “tears of passion” our fall had triggered. She lugged over a heavy object wrapped in brown packing paper. “This,” she sniffed, “is from Aunt Erna. She couldn’t be here today—you know, her sciatica—but she wanted you to have this heirloom. It has already… survived… three generations of marriages in our family.”
Mia and I tore the paper open. Inside was a wall clock made of solid oak, decorated with carved deer and a pendulum that looked like a severed wooden foot. “It strikes every full hour,” Beate whispered reverently. “And it reminds us that the time of love is precious.” “Or that every hour could be the last,” I muttered, eyeing the monstrosity sceptically. The thing felt like it weighed a ton.
At that moment, Basti—our Dr von Vogelstein—staggered into the spotlight. He had consumed the contents of several glasses of sparkling wine, and his turtleneck was so soaked with sweat it clung to him like a second skin. He climbed onto a stack of tyres and spread his arms wide.
“LISTEN TO ME!” he shouted in a voice dangerously close to a sob. “The clock… the clock is a metaphor! We are all pendulums in a casing of lies! Finn! Mia! Today you didn’t just get married… you defeated time! You are like… like two socks in a washing machine, finding each other in the spin cycle of existence!”
The army of extras, who had been on the verge of mutiny because the free beer keg was empty, froze. Malte, the ‘sad uncle’, began to clap softly. “Profound,” he sobbed. “Simply profound.”
Meanwhile, Grandma Hildegard was standing at the gift table, starting to count the envelopes. She was a human metal detector for fraud. She pulled one envelope out, held it up to the light, and then looked straight at us. “Mia,” she called across the hall. “Come here for a moment. Uncle Herbert has given you something I’d like to examine more closely. It looks like a voucher for… ‘joint household consultancy’?”
Mia went pale. “A household consultancy? That’s… that’s surely just a joke from Herbert!” “He said you were having trouble with the utilities,” Hildegard replied with a smile more dangerous than Karl-Friedrich the rat. “I told him I’d be happy to take care of that for you. I’ll come to the flat next week and take a look at your accounts. As a wedding present.”
My heart stopped. Lukas, who had just been trying to slip an envelope marked “travel money” into his trouser pocket, froze like a pillar of salt. If Grandma Hildegard audited our finances, she wouldn’t just find the two thousand euros in debt, but also the receipts for duct tape, the eBay ad, and Basti’s penguin costume dry-cleaning.
“That’s… that’s wonderful, Grandma!” Mia managed, while trying to hold the oak clock in a way that wouldn’t crush her feet.
Basti, still on his tyre tower, had now started humming “My Way”, while Karl-Friedrich scampered triumphantly across the face of the new clock. We had the envelopes—but the customs grandma had just lit the fuse on our entire house of cards.