[1000] Romantic Comedy (not a comedy)

A man comes in the night, whispered Virginia. Sister Sarah scowled down her righteous habit. Her cane of violence trembled. You lie. Except I do not, Sister Sarah. He visits my chamber whenever the moon hangs full in the night sky. You are a liar and a whore and you've made this mess on your own, said Sister. You will stay in this room until the sickness is out of you. Do you understand. I do, said Virginia. That night, however, the moon remained full, and the man did come. Breathless again and panting, he found her at her window. She could not flee for she was tied to the bed with twine. What do you want from me, said Virginia? The man only howled as was his wont. Like a wolf he looked to the sky when he howled. Like a wolf...man. Are you not a beast, aske she. Is this why you come to me naked in the night and howling so? Does the moon's fullness make you thus? The man panted moreso. Crawled nearer and licked at her leg. Sniffed her leg. Tell me, she said, do you return to your life as a dog when the moon disappears? He turned his head and frowned. Barked. It is true then, she said, you are a beast. Are you not? A man wolf. What am I to do with you? Why do you visit my chamber? The nuns, they don't believe you exist. Even in this valley of the wolves, one ravenous man of your condition is not easy to understand. The man huffed and sniffed at her feet, her crotch. No no. If you're thinking this should turn into some romance, I would urge against it. But the man persisted. Really, she said. Think of the implications of this.

Elsewhere later there was a comedian who against the counsel of his peers insisted upon opening his act without a routine or joke or plan to speak of. Instead he preferred to step out onto the stage in a state of total mystery to himself. This way, he met the faces floating in the sea of dark as perfectly curious as they were, hoping of course that fate or creativity might any second now swoop him up and narrow a path from the infinite. Something pure and real and interesting and mysterious to everyone. He would smile at first and be met with smiles, hundreds of sparkling eyes suspended over candle lit tables. Except inevitably the smiles would wilt. Faces would frown at his stuttering and aimless performance. Hardly a performance. Had he just walked out here with nothing? Surely not. He wasn't too shy to speak, yet he had nothing prepared. Just a digressive, branchingly awkward spontaneity. He'd offered himself up to be devoured, really. And yet he bombed happily, for it was only in these moments of pure unscripted improvisational nothingness did he ever feel readily alive, albeit unfunnily so. And at the cost of his career and ego. But what even was an ego, and wasn't sweating profusely with a failing imagination and a shaky voice still somehow better than the frauds whose talents required the crutch of instructions to demonstrate? Would a chess player proceed the same, with a sequence of premade moves irrespective of those his opponent played back at him. The wonderfully dynamic interaction between the comedian and his audience was the nectar. Surely. The juice. And he would squeeze as much off it as he could without ever considering to sully that sweet water.

Meanwhile a woman in the crowd sat so coldly and jaded that she could not be caught dead so much as smiling in family photographs, her face long since having yielded to this mood and the burden of gravity, resting in a perpetual frown of bitter resentment. Her nearest friends (nearest and not closest, since this would reduce the list to zero) would call it the visage of a professional bitch. So it was ironic then, that she would attend this performance, since there was nothing more repulsive to this woman than those who perform, and in her experience, she alone refused to do so, save for maybe autists. Or someone sleeping. Which she might as well be right now, a sleeping autist.

And now here comes the moment where the comedian with the open-ended bit began to sweat, his brain lurching like a car with cube wheels crunched between two greater idling cars, watching with crawling scalp moisture the lack of even ironic enthusiasm or hope for his so called act.

Except now he spots her, the woman whose face had arrived this way, unimpressed, visibly expecting nothing from anyone, appearing to all the world like she could watch him drown without kicking him the rope at her feet. And he placed a damp hand over his damp brow to see her better, for something had changed.

The woman, hypnotized by his display, had somehow brightened for perhaps the first time. That her own brow had even so very slightly lifted at his appearance, seemed to indicate his commitment to the lack of a bit had somehow opened her heart to the possibility that she was not alone in this universe, that he himself wasn't alone, that he was alone no more than he was funny.

And to a choir of heckles and booing he'd grown so familiar with, and against his own usual judgement, he found himself compelled to step right of the stage and cross the pub to greet her. And with sudden urgency and to the alarm of everyone at her own table, did she rise from her chair and stand like a tree to anticipate him, her arms straight against her sides, her hands balled into nervous fists, her brow raised with the worried hopeful frown of a heart-ached beaten dog risking everything and everything so that life might for once show her just this one sweet mercy.

And the crowd hushed. And they looked into each other's eyes. And they each of them swallowed. And nodded.

Except she could not proceed without first getting that one thing off her chest.

Would you love me, she said, if I'd maybe fucked a shapeshifting wolf in boarding school.

And he nodded with a little hesitation. More of a head wobble than a nod. But more than the left-right drifting was an uncertain upward-downward effect.

We should talk outside he said.