Word Count: 339
Her bed was of marshmallows, the sheets of whipped cream. Her nipples were chocolate tipped cherries on mounds of sorbet. I fell in love at the library where I first saw her but did I say how her hair fell like carmelized sugar on the satin puff clouds of the pillows?
There was nothing about her that appeared less than perfect. There was nothing to point out as a cute little flaw. No space between her front teeth nor ears that stuck out like a monkey’s between her fine hair. She was perfectly formed to fit into my body as a scoop of ice cream fits into a cone.
And she loved me. And it worried me, that love she professed. For how could a woman of her beauty and poise love a man such as I?
I am a gambler by nature, taking the long shot, my hopes ever high in beating the system though nothing in my past, present, and future suggest that I in some way am a winner at life. I am the first one caught in the layoffs. I am the one who has invented the better toothbrush, the coal-furnace car. I am the hopeless dreamer of dreams that have turned into financial and emotional nightmares and yet, she claimed that she loved me. Where was the justice in that?
Eventually even I could not let it be. I stood her up at restaurants, watching from a safe distance as she kept checking her watch, ordered dinner, sipped coffee and bit delicately onto spoonfuls of brûlée. Watched her pay and walk out to her car and drive slowly away. I became rough with her in her bed, quick and selfish, leaving her heaving and halfway.
She was loving and kind, uncurious and adapting through it all to the end. I took her on a cruise to Antigua and dove off the ship and swam home.
I never saw her again. She fell into my own hopeless history, as I’d always expected she would.
