5Once, they were happy. They would sit on a hill together, eating melon, then making love under the starlit, summer night sky. Such was the passion of the couple that they would lie unashamed, exposed to the moon and the stars. They stared into each other's eyes, lost in the moment, and they were truly content. He would touch her cheek, then smile, and she would smile back. Her strawberry blonde hair caressed her body, and her husband was truly taken by her exotic, exquisite, pale beauty.
This romance lasted many weeks, and despite being the only company of each other, they never tired of one another. Their marriage had them as one; it was the stuff of beautiful dreams. Together they would be always, in love, tragedy, illness and death. Nothing could bring them apart.
The husband was struck down with a crippling ailment. He became more and more ill, he coughed blood, he would awake screaming in the night, his illness causing him terrible pain. In desperation, they spent their life savings on the man, but corrupt doctors left them broke and the man in poor health. It seemed as if there was no hope left.
In actuality, there wasn't.
No longer could they stay late nights on their favourite hill, no longer could they eat melon together, no longer could they make love in front of the stars. But together they remained. But the sickly man's wife yearned for old times. Her insistence was pushed to the point of madness, and they both paid dearly for it.
They were together, but instead he lay in a dusty cathedral, at the dawn of the day. Desolate and silent, the rising sun shone through the frosted blue glass onto the young, but broken couple. He sat there, dying in a pool of his own filth. And she still loved him, he thought.
"I'm sorry," he croaked.
They would have a few last moments together, his wife insisted. Helpless, he couldn't struggle, despite the way he pleaded, pleaded that he couldn't satisfy her, not this last time. Try as he might, he couldn't refuse her. As he shrunk away, she looked down at him, expressionless. She placed her boot on top of his white head. With a sickening crunch, his head smashed, into a bloody, broken, slick red mess, like crushed mulberries, but with more bone, and more lumpy.
She gorged herself, like his head was a melon. She feasted ravenously on the remains.
She tore off his ring finger.
Desperate to be with him like old times, she pushed it inside, wedding ring and all, enjoying the bloody orgasm, which haemorrhaged her stomach and ripped her in two.
It was almost the way she wanted it.
Separate pools of blood mingling in pools together, and shredded, mangled bodies, brains and bowels lying upon each other, they died together, in a gruesome shadow of the way they lived. It was a nightmarish ending to a beautiful dream. But this time, the stars and the moon couldn't bear to watch, couldn't bear to watch such a miserable, depraved conclusion.
And they were separated at death. One goes to the utopian kingdoms of the high heavens, the other to the chaotic pits of the burning hells. No longer together as before, the chemical bonds of love were nothing against God's judgement. Bliss and agony are nullified as the two souls yearn for one another, the attachment that drew them together from the beginning burns brightly, and every few eternities these two tortured spirits relive their happiness, if only for a few decades.
A single orgasm in a lifetime of burdens, a drop of poison in a sea of salty water, a cousin of a cousin of a niece of a grandmother of a grandmother.
And yet they still remember, they love to recall that they sat and ate melon on a hill together, under the starlit, summer night sky, how they made love with each other, how their bold passion shone, how they were unashamed in front of the moon and the stars. He remembers the way her strawberry blonde hair would caress her smooth, beautiful, naked body, she remember the way he smiled and touched her face gently and how she would smile back. They would hold each other's liquid gaze, a gaze that left no questions as to what they felt, a gaze that reflected the moon light and shared their love.
Every now and then this inseparable pair are permitted to share the company of one another, to meet again, to be privileged so. They forget the horrible way they were separated, and gladly indulge in the adulation of one another. Two lovers remember the past, in each other's embrace, and they are truly content. They relive their past bliss, and enjoy the moment.
By Philip Lochner