Wednesday 3 April 2019

Obstacles to Love

Found this site useful- a story generator site. Follow link.www.storytoolz.com

Here is a flash piece on Obstacles to Love


He was meant to be a Rhett Butler, a charming rake, or at least landed gentry like Mr Darcy. Right? That’s what they all said. Loaded with pistol shot, roguish tongue or a large dollop of pride, a country estate in Derbyshire, a townhouse in Grosvenor Street or Hanover Square.

She’d been stalking romantic heroes all her adolescent life, even problematic ones, the likes of Heathcliff replete with venom and revenge and an inferiority complex. To be fair her stalking was usually virtual, before virtual was a buzz word, apart from the Science teacher.

Her mother warned her she’d wear herself thin shadowing his every move about the town. She did. And when she dreamt of riding off into the sunset with her beloved she was vicariously acting out a sequence from a Robert Redford Western or an Onedin Line episode, or onstage with Gilbert O’Sullivan who, to her crush- tinted eyes, bore a resemblance to the victim of her imaginative peregrinations.

It was hardly her fault. She was fed a diet of Hollywood Greats, Romantic English Classics and a splice of Mills and Boon. And at least she wasn’t hankering for a Bogart; that would come years later with the anti heroics of Luther and Dexter. Real love was a decade or two away.

But once she acknowledged her condition, underwent a detox programme, refrained from imbibing books, film or media, suffered the inevitable  irritability, sweating, vomiting and fatigue she was on the road to recovery, deliverance, even salvation. 

But she did marry a man who, even they said, looked like James Onedin.


Copyright with Cathy Leonard 2019

2 comments:

  1. I had never heard of the Onedin Line, but I just googled it and the resemblance is uncanny!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. A rough diamond and a sea-faring man... always knew...

    ReplyDelete