For Love

by Jennie Bricker

For your seventh grade math teacher, you wore strawberry lip gloss. For the barista at the campus coffee truck, you smoked clove cigarettes. For the shaggy rapper after your divorce, you lived in a VW microbus, wearing natural fibers. For the corporate litigator in low-heeled pumps, you discussed your marginal tax rate at parties with glistening men and lightly scented women. For the polyamorous couple with a 40-foot yacht, you behaved so badly they left you stranded on an island. For the ferry pilot you danced with all night in a beachside bar under a canopy of palm fronds, you swore your first name was Aphrodite, you professed to adore ouzo, you contracted a sexually transmitted disease, and you pitched yourself into the sea when he rebuffed you. For the salvage diver who rescued you, you tended crook-necked squash in a garden plot in New England behind a yellow cottage with shutters. For the engineer in Maine who asked you to marry him on the first date, you ran away with a nonbinary bricklayer who taught you Mahjong and the definition of “hod,” which is what you named the King Charles Spaniel you adopted together even though you’d always recoiled from dog slobber. For the officiant at the funeral home that made “the arrangements” when a rogue blood clot killed the bricklayer, you entertained an inquiry about your belief in God by tipping your tear-swept face to the soft rain and trembling with laughter. For the oncologist who asked you to step into his office, you demonstrated inappropriate affect and embarrassed him by inquiring whether he ever dated his patients. For the registered nurse who showed you how to self-administer morphine, you wore garish scarves and said in a hoarse whisper, smiling, that you had no regrets.

About the Author