"Pine" and 7 Other Short Romances, Page 2

on board with. “Okay,” I simply said.

  Before she could escape, I walked up to her and asked.

  She chuckled, shook her head, and said, “Uh, no. I can’t. Sorry.” “That’s okay; I understand,” I said, as pleasantly as I could

  I didn’t understand, and I never forgot how rejection felt.

  The woman at the bench glances in my direction and smiles. She also has long, dark hair and soft, delicate features. She peers at me from behind hazel eyes, and God has sprinkled fine freckles across her nose. I suddenly find my breath shortening and my gut tightening. I smile and begin breathing deeply, slowly, to calm myself.

  These are techniques my shrink taught me. I went to him to help with my depression. I told him about how boring my job has become, the unreasonable demands of my manager, the incompetence of my coworkers, my brother who is always trying to one-up me, my parents who seem to hate me, old friends who never seem to have time for me anymore—

  Suddenly, he slapped his hands together with a loud, sharp crack. “What’s the problem?!” he shouted.

  Taken aback, I blurted out, “I’m lonely. I want a girlfriend.” I had never had a close relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Yes, I had felt crushes, but I never acted on them, nor did I want to. Instead, I plunged myself into other areas of my life, which I much preferred, because I simply did not know how to talk to girls.

  So he taught me the basics.

  “Hi,” I say to the cute brunette.

  “Hi,” she says back.

  I stand and approach her, now working on her other shoe. The laces must have loosened, or maybe they weren’t tied tightly enough in the first place. She wears no jewelry on the fingers of her left hand. I’ve never seen her here before, probably because I usually take my lunch earlier, but a business meeting kept me today.

  “Can I buy you a cup of coffee sometime?” I ask.

  She grins without looking up. “I don’t drink coffee.” I roll my eyes. “Okay, then, some other casual, non-alcoholic beverage, whatever you like, tea, water... Orange juice, everybody likes orange juice.” She has returned her gaze to my face, and she’s still smiling, but she doesn’t speak.

  “In fact,” I continue, “there’s a coffee shop, right down the path here. We could walk there together. How does that sound?”

  After what seems like several minutes of me talking non-stop, she finally responds. “I guess that would be okay.”

  I introduce myself. “I’m Eric, by the way.”

  Her name is Melissa. She works in a nearby office building, in human resources, and she speed-walks in the park every day during part of her lunch hour. She wishes she had someone to walk with, but most of the people in her office don’t like to exercise.

  But I do like to exercise, and I like to walk, and I love the fresh air, and I would like to spend more time with her. Near the close of our conversation, I tell her as much. And we agree to meet tomorrow for a walk and a bite.

  I feel happy.

  Only the Lonely

  All those days sitting through Mrs. Owens’s seventh-grade algebra class, then years staring through Reverend Hardy’s sermons, and now centuries yawning through business meetings, she would have thought she’d have gotten used to the experience.

  She shifted in her seat, as the company CEO flipped to another PowerPoint slide, animatedly spewing the latest rendition of corporate spin to the assembled audience. Sales figures and production are up! (Except in the divisions that the company did not purchase this year.) We’re launching several exciting new projects! (Because we weren’t able to finish the last ones.) We now control more gigabytes of shitty software than all of Microsoft and IBM combined! (And that’s something to brag about? Even if it were true?)

  She glanced around. Hundreds more faces, just like hers. She was suddenly overtaken with isolation, that she could feel so alone amongst so many others just like herself.

  Next to her sat a man from marketing, or HR, or sales, one of those. Reasonably good looking, enough to catch her eye for a moment, he wore a conservative, white, button-down shirt and dark slacks, unlike the engineers she worked with. Even the rare woman engineer preferred to dress down, coming into the office in jeans and a tee shirt, the standard engineering uniform. She was the exception to the rule, today having donned a green a-line skirt and a white blouse, with an accompanying business jacket. Most visitors to her department assumed she was a manager.

  How could she work for the same employer as all these people, day in and day out, and yet only know a handful of them, and those only in acquaintance?

  She sighed, and without a thought, she leaned into the man sitting next to her. He allowed her to rest her head on his shoulder, as he reached around and ran his fingers lightly through her hair. She breathed in a manly scent, closed her eyes for a second, enjoyed a brief respite from the droning rhythm of the CEO’s voice.

  Oh my God! Realization hit her, and she started. Sitting up straight, “I’m sorry,” embarrassed.

  But he had also said likewise, and his cheeks flushed red. “I’m so sorry,” he repeated, lowering his voice. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  Some from the crowd were beginning to take notice. Most, however, had apparently been put under by the CEO’s speech. She returned her attention to the stage, tried to divert her thoughts from what had transpired.

  The CEO completed his final cadence; the audience politely applauded; the crowd began to disperse.

  “I’m sorry again,” the man said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

  “Are you from corporate?” he asked.

  “Engineering.”

  His eyebrows raised a half-inch, for a half-second. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee? Engineers drink coffee, right?”

  Dead, Long Dead

  “We’re both dead,” he says, “long dead. But that doesn’t mean we can’t grow alive again!” She can hardly believe what she’s hearing, of course. A fellow zombie, wanting to be human? Aspiring to be like them? If she didn’t know any better, she would think he was still one of them. But his pallor, his fetor, his unkempt appearance, his bulging eyes, his expressionless countenance, even the moan in his voice, all point to the sophistication that characterize their kind.

  How? she wonders, Again human? One cannot undo death, cannot un-lose one’s innocence.

  “No,” she says. “They want. We good.”

  He shakes his head at her. “You have it all wrong. They don’t strive to be like us, and we don’t fulfill their wishes. They just want to be accepted, to be included.”

  “We give them!” she shoots back.

  “We give them neither acceptance nor inclusion. Don’t you see? We are the ones who have lost our souls.”

  He presses on, and she hears his voice quickening, and wonders how he can talk so fast. “We tell ourselves that we’re better than them, but we only believe it because we hear it all the time. We don’t hold their answers; they hold ours.”

  She stares at him a moment, processing his words, almost too much for her. He’s wrong. He’s sacrificing everything she’s worked for, everything she is. She considers destroying him, like the humans sometimes do. Has a zombie ever destroyed one of his own kind?

  “You used to be human,” he says. “Have you forgotten already? Don’t you remember what it was like to think, to feel, what it was like to live? What it was like to love?”

  She wonders: is that why he’s doing this, betraying their kind, out of some misguided love? Indeed, love was a powerful emotion.

  He reaches his hand out and caresses her face. “I remember how you used to be filled with life, how you used to smile at me. How long has it been since we smiled?” And the corner of his lip inches up, stiffly, just a little.

  Clearly he is not a full zombie. He is still somehow part human. “You, human,” she says, and she moves to grab him, to attack him as she would a human.

  But he does not try to escape. Instead he says, “You can no longer hurt me
, my sweet. You can no longer destroy me. I have journeyed to death, and I am on my way back. I’ve met those who have returned to life, and they’ve shown me the way. It all starts up here,”—he points at his head—”in the mind, and here,”—he puts his hand to his chest—”in the heart. None of us has really lost the ability to live; we’ve just forgotten how. All you need to do is to accept it.”

  He gazes longingly into her eyes, a stare she just barely remembers. She used to be human, an existence she shed a lifetime ago, an existence that embarrasses her, that she wishes she could forget. His gaze bores into her long-forgotten soul, and she wants to lash out at him, to destroy him. But she also longs for it, for his affection.

  She takes his hand in hers and brings it to her lips. She has forgotten how to kiss, but the feeling of his skin against hers reminds of all she has forgotten. She looks to him for a reaction.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “You’re allowed to feel. You’re allowed to live. Don’t ever let them tell you otherwise, never again. Join us, and I’ll show you how.”

  Of Death and Smiles

  He smiled over his Sunday morning oatmeal, plain and steaming, his grapefruit cut into halves. Smiled with his eyes. Gotta remember, always with the eyes.

  “That’s your problem,” pointing at his wife’s sausage and pancakes, drenched with syrup.

  “And that’s yours!” She pointed back, at his grapefruit, her well-rounded face slinging condemnation.

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to get up off your ass once in a while, either, and