MAGPIE/ Prompt #39

                                          photo/ willow/ magpie tales


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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BEAUTIFUL...

BEING BEAUTIFUL

I liked being beautiful.  I liked having people stare when I walked into a room.  I liked that men fell for me in feverish or stealthy ways.  I spent some time being sure that I knew where the exit was.

I got up one morning, sweat poking out of my pores, and threw the covers away forever.  I remembered, once, hearing my mother and grandmother hushing each other so I wouldn't hear them talk about the "change of life".  What would that be, I wondered.  Turning green?  Growing feathers?

My pheromones no longer woke the dead.  I alternated between a flamenco state of mind, castanets at the ready, as if I could still seduce.  And high diving into icy pools, seeking the cool ritual of renunciation as a holy ceremony.

I was set free.  My hormones jumped out of my body, never to return.  I was emancipated and found my tranquil self.  So glad to rest from cues.  Not being seen, not on view, I got used to it.  Without a bitter taste.

No dye or rouge can pinch my cheek back to its youth and here's a day at last when I put the covers back, make the bed that stays so neat, a hollow at my side filled by the cat.

No sorrow.  This long vacation from passion stirs memories, which may be mine or some I've seen in a movie or two, because I can't tell if that beauty up there is me or some other star. 


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http://www.minblu.blogspot.com/
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