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The Toucher in the Ranunculi

The Catcher in the Rye Revisited

By Patrick M. OhanaPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Photo by Ezra Jeffrey-Comeau on Unsplash

Claspen Nymfield found out one gusty afternoon that he had a gift, namely the aptitude and penchant to make women happy, or at least happier—the gift par excellence. He had finished his lunch in the flowery park, a few minutes’ walking distance from his confined office, when he noticed one of those beautiful women who could take your breath away with a smile let alone a direct glance, walking past him. He looked at her dotingly, trying to visualize some of the splendour beneath her clothes, when all of a sudden, he saw an image of nymphaea flickering in his mind, her labia minora, as he later surmised. He felt the craving to caress them, stroke them ever so lightly with the tips of his fingers and see them open up like a sex book, but he could not imagine that his longing could influence them and affect her directly. She had slowed her pace and then came to a complete stop, feigning forgetfulness of some sort at first, but then revealing some initial surprise followed by more than a trace of satisfaction.

It happened subsequently, in one fêted form or another, with every woman that he tried to picture unclothed. Many of them figured out that it was tied to a particular time at a particular place; the morning subway after 8:00, the park after 12:00, and the late afternoon subway after 5:00, comprising but a number of his coveted venues during weekdays. A few of these women even realized that he was linked to it somehow, perhaps the cause behind it, but none of them could master enough nerve, or perhaps courage, but especially proof to speak to him about it.

He dreamt of spreading his gift around the country and the world, in packed airports, teeming train stations, heaving hotel lobbies, bustling restaurants, swarming streets, brimming shopping malls, crowded beaches, and even frozen ponds in wanting winters, though women would be scarce or nonexistent around the latter, but then recognizing that overdoing anything good could make it less so, or even bad.

Claspen Nymfield imagined himself surrounded by a multitude of concealed, protruding, or veiled labia, touching scores of them in endless fields of flowers, bestowing upon them joy and happiness, as the toucher in the ranunculi. Yet, from time to time, about once a week at first but then every night, he dreamt of a specific frozen pond that spelled his doom, since he saw himself falling through it and unable to breathe until he woke up.

One could construe that Claspen Nymfield would be distressed by this recurring nightmare, but he was not. In fact, he always laughed about it given that he never lived next to a pond or any other body of water, and thus reasoned that his recurring dream must be telling him something completely different. He thought about it from different perspectives, reading a few books, including Freud's, The Interpretation of Dreams, which he had already read in his early twenties.

A few months later, while sitting in the park across from his office and imagining the impossible as it would have been for anyone else to perform, he understood his recurring dream. The frozen pond symbolized his life in a couple of ways. He did not like his job but was frozen doing it, and he loved women but was unable to approach them, except in his imagination. His life was like a rimy tarn. His "On Golden Pond" was On Frozen Pond. Claspen Nymfield finally understood that his imagination was ice-covered, no matter all the beauty it could uncover.

fiction
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About the Creator

Patrick M. Ohana

A medical writer who reads and writes fiction and some nonfiction, although the latter may appear at times like the former. All my stories (over 2,200 pieces) are/will be available on/via Shakespeare's Shoes.

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