A Love Story

A Love Story

by Philip Mason on Monday, November 8, 2010 at 12:11am. Still needs editing. 

When it came to real cool names, these two kids had everyone beat. One kid was named Jarkeef Molombisad, and the other was named Etwiny Hellensport. Jarkeef was a little boy and Etwiny was a little girl. They were both 3 years old when they met at the park not far from the neighborhood in which they lived. Their mothers had brought them to the park most days of the week as soon as they learned to walk, because it was a great excuse for their mothers to get out and flirt with other men while their husbands were at work.

One day, a very hot day - because the sun was out and it was in the summer, and this park was in the state of Arizona - Jarkeef was crawling through the sand toward a plastic triceratops on which he planned to climb and laugh and play. He wasn’t aware that crawling toward this same dinosaur from the other side was a girl by the name of Etwiny. When they both reached the dinosaur at the same time they laughed like silly children. But very quickly Etwiny, being the young girl with an overbearing personality and selfish sense of entitlement that she was, became aggressive and tried to throw Jarkeef off of the dinosaur’s back so she could play on its plastic body by herself.

Had the dinosaur been alive and able to talk, he would have spoken to the children, assuming they could understand English sufficiently well (and judging by their names, a more intelligent talking dinosaur would hesitate to even entertain the idea that these children had even heard English spoken in their homes at all), and would have explained to them that there was enough room on his back for both of them to laugh and play and have fun. Jarkeef didn’t put up much of a fight, and Etwiny was able to successfully claim the dinosaur as her own when she knocked Jarkeef to the sands of shame below.

Jarkeef cried loudly, grabbing the attention of his promiscuous mother who had just finished giving her phone number to a gentleman with a beard, simply because she was fond of bearded men. Mrs. Molombisad ran over to her crying son and picked him up to hug him and to ask him what was wrong. He pointed to the girl on the back of the dinosaur who was making a face like a very young bitch, with squinted eyes and a triumphant smile. Mrs. Molombisad carried Jarkeef home, telling him to try to play nice with the other kids.

The next day at the park, Jarkeef went straight to the dinosaur and played happily for almost twenty minutes until Etwiny showed up. She tried climbing onto the dinosaur, but Jarkeef kicked her in the teeth and jumped on her to shove her face into the sand. To someone watching from the outside, knowing the whole story, and not being a parent of either child, it would appear that Jarkeef was simply getting revenge and showing Etwiny not to fuck with him ever again. However, to Etwiny’s mother, it looked like a bad case of bullying. She ran over and pulled Etwiny up out of the sand and yelled at young Jarkeef for such atrocious behavior. But Jarkeef’s mother walked over and, without hesitation, flung a storm of animosity into Etwiny’s mother’s ears. The two went at it for some time. As time went by, Etwiny escaped from her mother’s arms and crawled back to the dinosaur. By some fateful stroke of magic, the two young beings began to play together happily and cooperatively, even hugging and helping each other achieve personal success on the back of the plastic prehistoric beast.

The two mothers, though caught in a furious pissing contest, soon noticed the affection their two offspring had for one another and turned their pissing into kissing. Yes, I do mean that the mothers began kissing one another on the lips with wet passion. As their lips and tongues wrestled in harmony and danced in the drool that puddled in their mouths, the women each had realizations of forbidden desires igniting in their hearts. This fire could only be put out by their saliva, which they exchanged enthusiastically.

When the kissing had finished, the mothers took their children home and told them to never speak of the day’s events to their fathers. The children never did. This episode of mutual appreciation for one another was the beginning of what became a powerful friendship between Etwiny and Jarkeef. Their mothers also had fondness for one another, but that is a story for another time.

As Jarkeef and Etwiny grew older, they grew closer. At 10 years of age they were inseparable and always having a good laugh together. A good laugh is good to have, and they knew this. They laughed as much as, if not more than, most 10 year olds their age. Although Etwiny had a circle of friends who were all girls, and Jarkeef had his friends who were all boys, they spent most of their free time hanging out with one another in secret fellowship.

At 13 years of age, the two kids shared their first drinks of alcohol in the basement of Jarkeef’s house. They followed this a few days later with some cigarettes, blowing smoke in every direction they could think of. A week later, Etwiny brought some pot over and they smoked it in Jarkeef’s garage. At 15 they shared their first kiss with one another, and enjoyed it as much as they thought they would. When they were 20 years old, they shared their first sexual experience with one another, by having sex like the sex they had seen in Etwiny’s dad’s porn tape collection.

What they hadn’t seen in these porn tapes were condoms. Jarkeef remembered hearing something about condoms in eighth grade but he and Etwiny, when discussing the matter after a bottle of shared vodka, both agreed that condoms must be tools used for creating balloon animals that are more textured than standard balloon animals, and so thought they wouldn’t be important in their escapades of pleasure.

Much to the surprise of these two experimental young adults, this pleasure trip resulted in Etwiny’s pregnancy. Or, at least, what they thought was a pregnancy. Etwiny’s bulging belly was really only a result of her eating too many of her mother’s chocolate ice cream burritos. But the two were very worried by this inflation, and told their parents the good news.

The four parents were full of great ideas. Most ideas were interesting and really worth considering, but way too wordy and busy to describe here. Etwiny and Jarkeef talked about it one night while they both thought about applying for college, and decided marriage was their best option. They told their parents what they had decided, and their parents thought it was a super idea. Actually, Etwiny’s father didn’t like the idea at all, but no one cared what he thought because he now lived in Germany with a new woman, because he and Etwiny’s mother got divorced after he found out she was having sexual snack time with Jarkeef’s mother. This fact has only now been mentioned because it wasn’t relevant until now. It will remain irrelevant from this point forward. But there’s probably some real heartache and drama behind that story that we’ll have to explore at another time.

Etwiny and Jarkeef got married and were very much in love. Having been virtually attached at the hip for 17 years, they couldn’t imagine their lives without each other. They began finishing each other’s sentences, which they thought was cute and socially acceptable. They started dressing alike, which they thought was indicative of a strong bond and deep admiration for the other’s uniqueness. They even pretended to have the same opinions on everything from movies and music to drink preferences. It was clear they were in a solid fucking relationship.

It wasn’t long into the marriage before they realized that Etwiny wasn’t pregnant. She finally went to the doctor to see when her imaginary child would be born only to discover that she was just naturally getting fat, and that there was no romantic context to her physical appearance after all. She was crushed, but not as crushed as her husband, Jarkeef. Jarkeef had bought a house with the money he had accumulated from his job which, until now, hasn’t even been mentioned in the story, because self-sufficient characters who somehow do very well for themselves without appearing to have a job is a very attractive feature in a work of fiction. But, this isn’t fiction, okay? This is real life.

So, Jarkeef had bought a house and he had bought it extra-big. He and Etwiny had decided extra-big was a good size because:

a) Etwiny was now extra big, in that she was fat and was taking up a lot of room

b) They suspected they had a child on the way, and judging by Etwiny’s size, it could even be fully grown quadruplets.

An extra-big house costs more than a small or even average house, which is no secret. Jarkeef spent most of his big bank savings on this house and was going to be paying it off for a very long time, he realized. When Etwiny gave him the news that no child or children were living inside of her body, Jarkeef got angry. But he was more angry at himself for being an idiot who did things impulsively and without really evaluating the wisdom in the decision than for the lack of pregnancy. After all, it wasn’t like he couldn’t just knock her up, anyway.

But it was like that, in fact. Jarkeef and Etwiny tried unsuccessfully to get pregnant for years. By the time they were 30, they had tried 18,663 times to plant the life seed inside of Etwiny’s birth guts to no avail. Their marriage was suffering partially because of this failure to procreate, but also because Etwiny was still kind of the bitch she was 27 years ago, and Jarkeef was still the pansy crybaby he was 27 years ago. Though most people grow out of this kind of child-like behavior as they grow older, these two did not. They let their weaknesses consume them as they lived in seemingly perfect harmony with one another. This perfect harmony was a cleverly developed illusion, however, to their closest friends and family. The harmony was ruptured by this seed-spreading problem they had been facing for a decade. In this lack of pregnancy, had Etwiny stopped eating chocolate ice cream burritos and made herself any more attractive to Jarkeef, or found a job to help pay for the house? Of course not. Did Jarkeef man up and start living his life like a stallion instead of a coward, or lift weights to make his muscles big enough to dilate Etwiny’s netherparts? Nope.

They were failing one another. They were failing themselves. This failure began to tear away at their love, and eventually its corrosive aspects ate through the chains of  their romance.

“And if you don't love me now /You will never love me again /I can still hear you saying you would never break the chain”

This is what Etwiny said to Jarkeef, which was a quote from her favorite Fleetwood Mac song. But its words were relevant to her, and to their marriage. Jarkeef didn’t recognize that these words were from a song, since he didn’t listen to Fleetwood Mac and thought Etwiny was just being melodramatic. He explained that he never tried to break the chain, but that sometimes chains just break. This chain broke alright, and just as impulsively as they got married, they got divorced. It was not a messy divorce, but the two severed all communication and both left Arizona to start new lives not tainted by the common surroundings they’d shared for their entire lives.

Jarkeef moved to North Carolina where he worked as a movie theater chef, and Etwiny moved to California where she worked as an out of work actress who was paying the bills waiting tables at a fancy restaurant.

Jarkeef’s love life didn’t suffer, but never really soared, either. He dated women in his little town and hoped to settle down with someone someday to start a family. Etwiny didn’t date much, but slept around and tried to get impregnated by wealthy men who could take care of her.

Years passed and the two had thought of the other only occasionally, on dark and lonely nights, or when life was so dull and uninteresting that there was literally nothing to think about except for failed romances of the past. But this didn’t happen as often as one might think, for over the next 15 years it happened only a handful of times. Much of the rest of that time was spent worrying about money and interpersonal struggles that were never voiced by either person, to any of their friends or family.

Jarkeef’s darkest hours were filled with thoughts of confusion and crisis. He felt his life was out of control and spiraling into unknown territory. As he understood his anxiety more, and investigated its origins, he concluded that his entire sexual identity was conflicted. Over the following months he made the expensive choice to have a sex change. This would fix everything, he thought. His impulsive nature, though not fully gone, had at least stretched out into something resembling reflection and consideration when it came to making important decisions. He felt this was wise, and a form of growth toward a new beginning.

Meanwhile, in California…

Etwiny came to strangely similar conclusions after dealing with an AIDS scare following a brief romantic fling with a biker gang in Oakland. She would undergo a sex change operation to live a much easier life as a male, no longer burdened by being a woman.

At the age of 50, Jarkeef, now a woman, was going by the name Lelaine Delicacy. She relocated yet again, for her “new lease on life” as she called it, this time to New York City, to begin life as a shop owner. She didn’t know what kind of shop she would own, she only knew she’d have to own one because she lived in NYC and that was pretty much all she knew that people did in that city.

Also at the age of 50, Etwiny, now a man, was going by the name Samuel Menthol. He moved to New York City to find work as a taxi driver, which he thought was a secure form of employment seeing as how the streets of NYC were always bleeding yellow with the infinite stream of taxis transporting humans from here to there.

Lelaine Delicacy was late one morning to work, and she really had to get to her shop on time since it was a shop of clocks and elegant timepieces and no one would ever take her merchandise seriously if even she couldn’t be on time. In her great hurry, she didn’t have time to wait for a bus so she flagged down a taxi speeding through the streets outside of her trendy apartment.

She climbed inside the taxi of Samuel Menthol, and told him the location of her shop. The two got to talking, and fell deep into conversation that hinted at romantic interest and lustful hunger for the other. Lelaine asked Samuel if he wouldn’t mind making a short stop at another shop before dropping her off at her own. He said he would be happy to oblige her, because there were so many good shops around, seeing as how it was New York City and all.

Lelaine ran inside to buy something, and promptly returned to the taxi with a small decorated bag. Samuel continued on to her shop. When they got there, Lelaine invited Samuel in for a drink and a free grandfather clock. Samuel misheard her and said that he wasn’t gay and didn’t need any old man’s penis inside of him, butt or mouth or otherwise. Lelaine, immediately recognizing the misunderstanding, corrected him and said she felt a closeness to him that she wanted to explore a little more before he left. Samuel, being new to his man-ness, thought it might be a good idea to finally put it to work.

Once inside, Lelaine made sure the front door to the shop was locked before undressing in front of Samuel, exposing her fake and surprisingly young breasts before his eyes. Samuel removed his clothes as well, and flashed his brand new penis at Lelaine.

As far as romantic conquests go, this one was the stuff of legends and fairy tales. They fornicated for hours in the realm of clocks and timepieces, as the minute hands inched by, soon hour hands made full circles of their clocks, and the occasional cuckoo bird flew out of a small wooden door to alert them that they were being watched by the clocks of ages.

When the two transgendered romantics put their clothes back on, Lelaine pulled out the small decorated bag from her coat and took something out of it. It was a small clay triceratops, much like the plastic dinosaur on which Jarkeef and Etwiny first met, 47 years earlier. When Samuel saw the dinosaur he said nothing. Everyone’s got dinos, he thought. This woman can’t possibly know…

That day a romance was born, and the two became intimate and passionate with each other every day for the next weeks. After mere months of dating, Samuel decided to propose to Lelaine. But he wanted to support her and buy her fancy things, so he got a job as a corporate executive of a very powerful international company. You just have to apply for those things, and sometimes, if you’re old enough, you land the job. Simple. Samuel got lucky and got the job. He was raking in millions.

Samuel proposed to Lelaine, who gave him a happy “yes”. They were married months later and lived in an extravagant home in Manhattan. Lelaine sold her stupid clock shop and said to Samuel that if she never saw another clock again for the rest of her life, it would be too soon. Samuel said they would just have to have sex with the lights off from that day on, and got a little bit sad. Lelaine once again corrected him on his hearing error, and told him to get a hearing aide or something, because clearly his hearing was bad. He knew it was bad, too, he just didn't really care.

Their one year anniversary was approaching fast. Unfortunately, Samuel had to go to Brazil on a business trip which would not allow him to return to the states until after their anniversary. Both Samuel and Lelaine were saddened by this, but they promised they would celebrate their anniversary upon Samuel's return.

Unbeknownst to Lelaine, however, Samuel planned a secret flight back to NYC from Brazil on the eve of their anniversary, to surprise her that night and celebrate the whole day with her before returning to Brazil.

Unbeknownst to Samuel, however, Lelaine had planned a similarly secret flight to Brazil to surprise Samuel at his hotel so they could celebrate their anniversary on South American beaches and have a splendid time together.

Unbeknownst to the pilots of these two airplanes, both flights were leaving around the same time, and as a result of some bad planning and bad piloting, both planes ended up in just about the same place at the same time. This same place, unfortunately, was in the sky, 33,000 feet above the Gulf of Mexico. Both planes collided in mid-air, exploding violently and killing everyone on board. Both Samuel and Lelaine died immediately. Their corpses didn’t even make it to the ocean, since they were completely vaporized by the intense heat of the fiery explosion. But a small, mostly melted clay dinosaur was found at the bottom of the ocean only a few years later by a team of Christian Scientist scuba divers. The remains of the clay dinosaur were mistaken for the fossils of an extinct crustacean, and left to sit on the ocean floor for the rest of time.

The end.