7/16/11

Crazy Love
By T. L. Sherwood


It starts by my wanting to show you this flower, but then you take my hand and say you want to kiss me under the trees, then in the bushes where we scare the rabbits away and a pheasant takes flight. We embrace and tear at each other’s clothing, nearly hoping to hear the shot of a hunter so we can make love in the wilderness under the added threat of being discovered by an armed gunman looking for his kill.
Later on, I imagine we sit talking softly on the porch steps while we pull out the burrs from the each other’s shoe laces, burrs that embedded themselves into the nylon at some point between when I first thought if you had been around, I would have wanted you to see this flower and the time it took to consider that if you were around, would showing you this flower be the foremost thing I’d want to do while in your presence.

This leads me to believe that the simple is rarely as simple as it appears and that the complex must be so much more vastly complicated than it already looks, that I can’t possibly begin to have another simple fantasy about you ever again. Which, for me is fine. There is no reason why I can’t accomplish this change of thought patterns. So, from now on, the fantasies I have about you will have to be so convoluted and improbable that I’ll never be able to derive pleasure from them because they will have to be so highfalutin, bizarre and down right strange that I’ll barely be able to understand them myself.
Something like, we are working on a space station when a fuel line clogs and I have to hold the pipe while you clean it with a bottle brush. Then a directive from Earth comes in on the teletype saying space cowboys are entering our vector and we have to hurry and prepare to defend our ship and you go faster and faster and…
See, I can handle this. I just don’t know how long I’ll be able to continue to make up bizarre situations that top the last in complexity because it might turn out to be just like drinking yourself sober, and the most bizarre, improbable, convoluted fantasy I could ever have would be of wanting to share with you the beauty of this single flower.


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T. L. Sherwood lives besides Eighteen Mile Creek in western New York with her second husband. Her writing has appeared in Vestal Review, Inkspill and the Boston Literary Magazine. She is currently working on revising the novel she wrote for National Novel Writing Month last year.