BLIND DATE
My cousin, Belle d'Amour, (I'm making up part of her name. Based on my early tendency for sarcasm), is the family matchmaker. The lines around her eyes etch her progression to seniority. She hasn't tamed the years too gracefully. The bluish skin beneath her sunken cheeks, her alleged Katherine Hepburn look, crinkles when she squints or smiles. A legend in her own mind.
Shiny pools of olive oil sit in the folds of her chicken skin, a waste of a major ingredient that would be put to better use in a salad. But the unguent, meant to smooth her profile, can't fool a callow youth such as I.
Her brows flow into pompous arcs when she looks at me. Appraisal, heaped with disdain, is my due, since the time when I was a babe running barefoot. Who would ever want me? My peccadillo? I am known as the skinny merink in my family. Therefore the one who doesn't stand a chance for wedded bliss. Hopeless case. Not as much as a soupcon of zoftig delight for hands groping for enchantment.
But it's the action of her chin turning into wattles, subject to the motion of every stomp and swish, that hypnotizes me, till her jowls come to rest on her collar, imprudently modeled after an Elizabethan bib.
Once again this Faberge' pullet has been summoned to find a husband for me. For some arcane reason, Belle d'Amour remains the touchstone for connubial resolution. We honor tradition.
One has only to look as far as my cousin Fern, inelegantly named after a potted plant, now morphing into an effusive weed, to see that there is indeed a mate for one and all...except if your taste doesn't run to gargoyles.
But I'm the lost cause, stuck in my family's fever dream of Romanov grandeur, waiting for my blind date to take me or leave me. Now I'm in suspense, waiting impatiently for some photos of my prospect to be delivered. Someday my prints will come...
Thanks again to Willow for the opportunity to try out this Prompt..fun and games as always..and please check all the rest!!
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