A romantic walk

Since my Facebook account is named ‘Tertius’, it behooved me to swipe this arrangement of golden letters from a pawn shop ad:

A romantic walk

I dialed up Rent-A-Sweetheart and placed an order. After a few minutes, my soulmate appeared at my apartment, and we went for a walk. Now I’ll tell myself the highlights.

The first major event of our romantic walk occurred when we tried to leave the complex itself. There was a police car parked at the end of our communal driveway – it was almost blocking our exit; so we had to inch past very close to its driver’s side door.

Once we escaped, I began conversation by guessing the reason for this obstacle: “Surely some Clytemnestra hath slain her spouse in one of the neighboring apartments, and the police have been called in to investigate.” But my soulmate disagreed: “It’s more probable,” she said, “that the officer simply parked here to catch drivers in the act of running the stop sign.” (For there was a stop sign nearby.)

When we crossed the road to walk on the path behind the science laboratory, a delivery truck had to slow down to avoid hitting us. This was my sweetheart’s mistake, for she had lured us to jaywalk; and I took her to task for it. Then we saw that the path behind the lab was flooded from the melting snow, so we had to turn back and take a different route – we had risked our lives for nothing.

Soon we came to a transit station, and outside of its automatic sliding door was a Multi-Loop Wave Style Bike Rack. So I said to my sweetheart: “If you were to chain me to that bike rack, how long do you think it would take for someone to rescue me?” And my sweetheart answered, “Well, it would depend on whether or not you would call out for help.” And I said, “I never dare speak to passersby.” So she said, “Then it would take two hours.”

Our walk’s last noteworthy event concerns what we encountered upon heading home. Abandoned by the roadside was a massive construction vehicle. This enormous machine was like nothing ever seen by human eyes. A fusion of various monsters, it combined aspects of a backhoe loader, a wheel loader, a bulldozer, and a standard excavator. Since it had been left unlocked and unattended, I said in a boastful voice: “I could go sit inside of that thing right now – no one could stop me.”

Then my soulmate picked up a crushed plastic bottle that had been left in the street, and tossed it into a nearby waste receptacle.