Death in a Green Dress
She was a knockout. Heart-stoppingly beautiful. Death in a green dress. She had hair the colour of an African river. You know, the colour of an African river after maybe one or two million wildebeest have fought their way across it, churning the mud, wading through the waiting hordes of hungry crocodiles. Not all the wildebeest make it. Some of them might bleed a bit. So the river—the bloody, muddy river—is red. Well, reddish. Anyway, that was the colour of her hair, the girl in the green dress.
Man, that hair! It gushed down from the top of her head, down her back, down over her shoulders. It looked like it had been poured. It had great sweeping curls, like eddies. It moved the way she moved. When she moved, she flowed. Right now she was flowing towards me.
Our eyes were locked in mortal combat. Hell, this was the real thing! Eyes across a crowded room, no way back, for keeps, real. Within that emerald silk sheath, her slinking curves hypnotised as they sashayed towards me. Her skin was so pale it glowed, and her lips were redder than a strawberry Mivvi.
Even before she reached me, her perfume was exploring my nose, invading my brain, conjuring possibilities in my overheated imagination. She drew level with me and stopped, posing in that one hip down posture that, a woman knows, shows off her figure to its best advantage. Guaranteed to grab the male gaze. Her eyes were locked on mine as she reached out, beckoning, willing me to take her hand. I complied.
Somehow, we contrived to lead each other out onto the dance floor. The music pounded, the lights flashed and our sheer animal presence usurped the space. The lesser mortals fell back to give us room. We moved as a single entity in a symbiotic embrace, our bodies swaying in time, the watchers’ hands clapping to the beat.
Her fingers played footsie on the back of my neck and those blood red lips quivered beside my ear.
“I need cheese,” she said, and the words, born on her warm breath, swirled in my aural canal, driving me crazy.
I guess, at this stage, I’d better introduce myself. That way, you’ll know who the lucky guy dancing with the goddess is. I’m Joe Stilton. I make cheese. Yeah. Coincidence, right? Or is it? They call it nominative determinism, but only if they’ve got a lot of letters after their name. I don’t believe in that ****. My profession and my name are just coincidence, OK? But this crazy-beautiful dame homing in on me and asking for cheese… well? Is that coincidence? I mean, suddenly, I get the idea that I’ve just been issued with my own personal Mata Hari and I’m up to my libido in a case of dairy-centric industrial espionage.
But, just how much notice am I taking of myself? Well, with the intoxicating fragrance of this woman in my nose, her hot breath in my ear, and her soft curves in my arms, swaying left and right, I can tell you, it’s not much. She wanted cheese. I’m the go-to guy for cheese in this town. I wanted her, and if getting her cheese got me what I wanted, she could have as much as she liked.
I buried my head under the flow of her hair and ran my lips up the side of her neck, and when I got to her lobe, I nibbled. Then I whispered into her ear, at full volume, because of the racket from the dance hall speakers.
“What kind?”
She threw back her head and laughed with the kind of gay abandon usually associated with mad women in attics. She could get away with it, though, because she was so hot. When she laughed, it was sexy as hell. I grinned like an idiot and licked my lips. She snuck in and answered at close range, so her words sizzled in my ear.
“Wensleydale,” she said, “And I want it toasted.”
Well, that was my cue. If I couldn’t supply this woman with some toasted cheese, I didn’t deserve to win her. I picked up the gauntlet.
“Come with me,” I crooned into her shell-like, “And I’ll lead you to the Promised Land—a veritable nirvana of toasted Wensleydale.”
Then, I escorted her from the dance floor to the applause of the crowd, which parted like the red sea, permitting our passage to the cloakroom and our coats.
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I think that this is probably the shortest piece of prose I've ever posted on here. This is as close as I get to flash fiction (of which, generally, I heartily disapprove). These days, writing has become physically painful. There is something wrong with the tendons on the back of my right hand. Consequently, I have severely restricted movement in my wrist and the fingers. It makes it very difficult to type. This, coupled with increased demands on my time from my various enterprises, means that I don't write much at all, these days. Still, it's nice to squeeze out an offering now and then. To have people express their appreciation of one, makes it all worth while.
