Indeterminacy 334 (A Valentine's Carol)

by Indeterminacy Category Writing



It was Valentine’s Day. I brought down the wall-bed and there she was.
“Who are you?” I asked the girl prone on her back wearing a mini skirt and casual black boots.
“I am the ghost of girlfriends past,” she moaned at me the way a ghost would.
“How delightful to see you,” I told her, showing her my undivided interest – as I was indeed delighted to see her – or all of them, even if the relationships hadn’t lasted all that long. I began to recognize Miriam’s eyes, Simone’s thighs and Katherine’s arm resting demurely below the tautly covered breasts that I knew were Tricia’s and Tina’s respectively.
She offered me Vickie’s hand and I grasped it in mine. Instantly we were out on the town, on a conglomerate of first dates. But it went terribly wrong in a faux pas flurry of slurped soup and stepped on feet and overstepped bounds followed by slaps to my face, and the odd kick below the belt. I returned limping to my room, having lost them all in one night. There on the bed lay another girl.
“I am the spirit of girlfriends present,” she stated less eerily, because she wasn’t dead.
I recognized all three of my current flirts in one body, which was kind of a touchy situation, as they weren’t supposed to know about each other. She sprang up and glared at me with Georgia’s fiery eyes and clawed at me with Lina’s razor-like fingernails and spat at me with Vera’s venomous mouth. It was all I could do to toss the three of them back onto the bed and close it into the wall before she could lunge at me again. She would have scratched my eyes out, I’m sure, and swallowed them for breakfast.
After a long quiet I deemed it safe to open the bed again. “I am the imagination of girlfriends yet to be,” announced the dark-haired beauty, her suggestive voice melting the icy fear of the previous visitation. I looked into her eyes and saw a collage of girls I’d had my eye on or stalked. She stared a beaconing gaze at me, then curled up on the bed, as if awaiting my advance. But she began to snigger as I approached, then to laugh outright, louder and fiercer. The love in her eyes turned to wicked mirth the nearer I came, and the laugh full of wrath. I pounced onto the bed to claim her kiss but found my mouth full of chicken feathers spurting from the mattress. After my coughing settled I noticed she was gone, and a note left on the pillow: “I’m leaving you, retroactively.”
But the day was still young. I went to the store to buy a new set of Valentine cards.