365 Writing Strips One Bare

She hadn't married him for looks, because he was most unsightly. She married him for his brain. Theirs was a marriage that was the opposite of the cautionary tale of those who marry their "one true" trophies for looks.

Even before looks fade, they pale in a lover's mind's eye sooner rather than later; there better be something else there holding things together. In their case, however, an irony on the cautionary tale emerged. She grew tired of his brain.

Until only his ugliness remained. She regretted not marrying for looks.

"I don't like your writing anymore," she told him one morning as he stepped out of the shower, naked. "Look at you, you disturbing tub of lard. I thought obesity would soften your unflattering features."

He threw the towel around him, ashamed, but it wasn't successful in concealing his entirety.

"You're not going to get any less gross to me, so you better change something in your writing. I've had it with your morose, maudlin, downer prose and your dulled-rapier poetic wit. He was humiliated. He belched, his GERD worsening as he had grown wider. "My sentiments, exactly," she scoffed.

"I write what I write," was his only defense.

"If you must write about ugly things, however poignant, step it up another notch. Make it uglier. Move me that way. I'm just here stuck on ugly you can't improve—either to something beautiful—God forbid!—or worsen it to something that rattles me enough to shatter me beyond the predictable I've been served."

He toiled day and night, and finally, after a month, sent her a text message with his newest creation.

"I see where you tried to go here," she said. "I know you couldn't write anything beautiful, but this certainly isn't uglier, either. How'd you figure this could be uglier?"

"Read between the lines. And then appreciate that I wrote it naked."

She read it again.

There were innuendos in the diction, strategic messages in juxtapositions of words, and—she realized—a subliminal call to action evoked, using only sneaky tenses, mood, and intransitives.

"Well?" he asked.

She looked up at him. There was hope.

"I'll need to read this again—naked," she replied. And then they made love.

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ABOUT THIS STORY: NOT an autobiography!

One more day to go in the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge, originated by L.C. Schäfer and, writing along with him and me, the other surviving "challengee," Rachel Deeming.