Who said Romance is dead?

The unfamiliar sound of weary feet grinding away on a seemingly never ending bed of pebbles echoed around the hillside for miles around. Militant-like in their timing and never failing to deteriorate in stature, the assortment of twenty-two toes continued to scamper up the rocky terrain enthusiastically. It had been a long climb but, at the end of it all, the view would certainly more than justify it.

She didn’t seem to think so though, but that didn’t matter.

Forcing my lungs to deflate to an almost critical point, I inhaled the mountain breeze and embraced the newfound molecules of oxygen that danced around in my system like a long lost brother. The monotony of working in the rectangular prison that most upstanding citizens labelled ‘the office’ for forty-five hours a week for the past twenty eight years had left me as a corpse of a man. No lust for life. No gusto. Nothing. However, as I stood like a Roman Emperor peering out from his balcony and towering over the several picturesque villages, I suddenly felt alive again.

And that was something I’d not felt in a long time.

“Can you smell that, Bill? I think one of the cows has left us a present over there,” mumbled Rita with a splutter.

It had been exactly twenty-three years since my last venture up the mountain side. On that occasion, two young lovers had fled the aches and stresses of daily life to enjoy a picnic lunch at nature’s leisure. The way in which Rita offered me perhaps the purest and most genuine smile I’ve ever received in this world as she laid out the immaculately kept checkered quilt will always stand out in my memory. People might think that one smile is as good as another smile – but that’s simply not true. There’s something about the impulses given off by smiling that opens a door to the soul. A smile is the single most honest thing that the Gods of this world ever created.

“I’m starting to itch all over, Bill. These stupid little flies keep biting me!”

Peering out at the bright lights of the microscopic villages below, I thought about the thousands of people readying themselves for another ‘action packed’ edition of their daily lives. They hadn’t yet decayed and realised that there was more to life than growing old next to the fire. Still, I always found it funny that people described the maturity process in a positive light – it’s clear that the only people that are truly content with life are children, so where’s the sense in growing up?

“Can we go back now? I’m starting to get cold. I knew I should have put another layer on underneath.”

Rita’s voice had changed over the years. Her degeneration from the sparkling songbird to the cackling old crow was now complete. I didn’t particularly blame her though. The sands of time seem to have this uncanny knack of draining an individual of all zest for life. Now, as I gazed over at the shadow of the woman I married all those years ago, I realised that her animated exterior had vanished and had been replaced with a shell of granite.

“Why did you bring us up here anyway, Bill? We’re getting too old to be hiking up mountain sides, you know. Linda Carmichael was telling me just the other day about her husband damn near having a heart attack when he was out jogging around the neighbourhood! He’s not in bad shape for a man of his age either,” ranted Rita as a case of verbal diarrhoea seemed to overcome her. “Are you even listening to me, Bill? Bill?”

Rita’s insistent chanting of my name over the years was undoubtedly one of the main reasons behind my suggestion of taking a walk on the mountain side. At first, she thought it was a fantastic idea and couldn’t believe that her husband of nearly twenty-five years actually cared enough about their relationship to try and re-kindle some sort of lost romance. Naturally, her enthusiasm towards the cause began to turn me away from my original reasoning for taking the walk. The idiotic part of my brain that had glided through life on auto pilot for all those years actually believed that perhaps she understood that our marriage was now nothing more than a thing of ‘mutual convenience’ rather than a sacred union. Even at the end, my naiveté continued to shine through. That was the most depressing thing about it.

Pacing towards the cliff edge, I began to reminisce over the ‘good old days’ – it even sounded like a cliché in my head. I remembered the way in which Rita’s hands would flow over my skin like a surge of water igniting my sense to life. Her every touch brought about an explosion of goose bumps across my naked body. It was almost as if I could taste her sense of adventure. There, we lay, entwined as two free spirits exploring the subtleties of life without a care in the world and then… we simply grew old.

“Bill, what are you doing? Come away from the edge.”

“Rita,” I began, ensuring a cast iron grip about my tone. “You must understand that what I do here today I do for both of us. I’ve always loved you more than life itself and that will never change. I hope that one day you will see why I did this. One day you will see what we have become. Goodbye.”

The blue sky above cringed as it took cowardly refuge behind its cloud cousins and peered away from the situation. Nature couldn’t bare to watch an innocent man plunge to his death with its naked eye. Instead, the Heavens pressed an ear to the floor and waited for the inevitable ‘thud’ that went hand in hand with any suicide jump.

However, it never came.

Grinding its ear firmly against the floor and almost crushing the cartilage in the process, nature finally heard some form of sound arise from the scene. Of course, I knew that this sound wasn’t that of a man plummeting several thousand feet to his death. No.

The sound was in fact the gagging noises that one would associate with a woman being strangled by a chequered quilt.

Rita had died years prior to this event, mind you. This was simply my way of putting her out of her misery. As I stared down at the lifeless carcass that lay at my mercy, I struggled to comprehend the fact that this body had once contained the woman of my dreams.

And so, I set off down the hillside certain of the fact that euthanasia was indeed a noble cause.