The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written

by H. M. Mann

  “Is that all you can say? Oh? Oh?” he echoed.

  She nodded and shivered as if the Ice Age had returned, T-Rexes and

  Johnny froze, too. How do you spell the flying kind of dinosaur? Oh sure, I could look it up and spell it correctly, but I’m flying so fast right now! I can’t stop to be exact! He shrugged and rewrote the sentence.

  She nodded and shivered as if the Ice Age had returned, T-Rexes and flying dinosaurs with huge wings and long beaks and goofily spelled names trudging and soaring around in her head, her thoughts a murky tar pit full of maggot-infested saber-toothed tiger carcasses.

  “Hey now,” Johnny said. “That thar is some good, clean writin’.”

  “Huh?” Gunn asked with a grunt.

  Cat hadn’t been paying attention. “What?” she asked, as if she had ADHD, which, indeed, she had. She had never outgrown her hyperactivity, and because her parents had seriously overmedicated her as a child, Cat wept herself to sleep every night thinking of all the other overly overmedicated children of the world with cruel parents who believed hyperactivity to be a sin punishable by military school, spankings, Ritalin, and membership in the Republican Party.

  “I said, ‘Huh,” Gunn said with another grunt.

  “Huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is that all you can say? Oh? Oh?” Gunn suddenly had that strange feeling of déjà vu and knew that he had lived before as a praying mantis, even though he didn’t believe in reincarnation or particularly like praying mantises because of their close biological relationships to termites and cockroaches.

  The T-Rexes and flying dinosaurs had returned to befuddle Cat’s mind. They mistook her singed red head for a nice geranium to munch upon.

  “Huh?” Gunn, the incorrigible rogue, said for the umpteenth time.

  Johnny knew that words like “umpteenth,” “rogue,” and “incorrigible” were required to appear in every romance novel ever written. He was oh so happy he had put them all in the same sentence!

  Once again, Johnny hit a dead end, but he found his solution more quickly this time:

  “We need to talk,” Cat said.

  “We are talking.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry about saying ‘oh’ so often.”

  “Huh?”

  “What?” Cat was flusterated.

  What’s with the red line under “flusterated”? Johnny thought. It is so a word! I heard someone say it to me just the other evening on a delivery. “I am so flusterated at you!” the woman screamed. I thought it was pretty clever. “Flustered” plus “frustrated” equals “flusterated”. I’m leaving it in. Johnny pressed on.

  Gunn was flusterated, too, and without another “huh,” he stormed out, got in Cat’s Geo Storm

  Wait, Johnny thought. I blew up that one. Here’s an easy fix.

  Gunn was flusterated, too, and without another ‘huh,’ he stormed out, got in Cat’s new Geo Storm, went to the last Blockbuster on earth that still rented movies and didn’t have a Starbucks attached to it, rented Storm of the Century, and spent a stormy night a-low-un in his secret crash pad across town.

  Johnny frowned. Do I describe the secret crash pad in detail? Of course not! Then it wouldn’t be a secret. Duh.

  The next day, Gunn felt something like guilt. It reminded him of the time he ate too much Halloween candy and his stomach felt like the Hindenburg before it exploded in New Jersey in 1937, oh the humanity! It reminded him of the time he set fire to the class gerbil, only no one noticed since the gerbil usually smelled pretty bad and ate its own poo. It also reminded him of Spam for some reason, though he never eaten Spam in his life.

  Thus, out of guilt he couldn’t completely explain, Gunn bought flowers for Cat to mend the tremendous rift between them caused by the dreaded but as-yet-purchased Pomeranian. These weren’t just any flowers, however. They were nice flowers, and he bought these nice flowers at a florist called, aptly, Nice Flowers. They smelled like roses even though they looked like daisies. He supposed that Nice Flowers kept all their nice flowers in the same nice refrigerator. He hated when his food smelled like other food. A single onion left in the fridge turned his milk oniony. One time a moldy piece of cheese made his lettuce taste cheesy. It was a good thing Gunn’s condiments came in several thousand sealed fast food packets.

  “Here are your peonies, sir,” the girl said.

  Johnny knew he didn’t have to name “the girl.” She was the generic checkout chick, and every reader would recognize that. Who says you have to name every person in every story? I mean, look at War and Peace. If Tolstoy didn’t name every character, you might actually be able to follow the plot. Johnny continued their dialogue.

  “Peonies?”

  “Yes, peonies.”

  “I can’t tell my soul mate, ‘I want to make up with you, here are your peonies!’” Gunn yelled tellingly.

  “You picked out peonies, sir,” the girl said in a picky manner.

  “I want roses!” Gunn howled rosily. “I said, ‘Give me those roses there’!”

  “You pointed at the peonies, sir, so I wrapped up peonies,” the girl said pointedly.

  “You knew what I meant,” Gunn said knowingly in the past tense.

  “I do not have ESP, sir,” the girl said using her sixth sense.

  “Oh.” Gunn wrinkled up his incorrigible rogue’s face. “Well, I want roses, every last rose you have! All of them!” He pointed at some long yellow flowers.

  “Those are daffodils, sir,” the girl said in a daffy and dilly manner.

  “Just roses! Spare no expense for my sugar muffin!” Gunn bawled expensively.

  The girl smiled a smiley smile full of smiles. “Is she your sweetie?”

  “Yes.” Gunn stood tall. “Cat Mann is my snookums, my boo, my sweetest, my girl, my main squeeze, my honey, my darling, my treasure, my truelove, my sweet patootie, my inamorata.”

  Johnny smiled. What do you know? Thesauruses can be useful after all. He cracked his knuckles and continued typing.

  “Oooooooh, you are a dream,” the girl cooed dreamily. “Are you foreign?”

  Gunn flexed every muscle in his body and gave himself some severe cramps in the bottoms of his feet and just under his third rib. “I am a man of the world.”

  The girl flushed with romantically romantic feelings of romance and wished that she, too, could have a man of the world who was clueless about flowers and spared no expense for his sweet patootie. Her life just plain sucked like a calf sucking on its mama’s teat, only not as milky or freaking gross.

  “Do you have a brother?” she asked in a brotherly way. “I mean, gosh, if I can’t marry you, maybe I can marry your brother and make you some nieces and nephews.”

  “Sorry, my dear girl,” Gunn said in a dearly sorry way. “I have no brother. They killed him!”

  “Who killed him?”

  Gunn looked down on the little waif. “You’re much too young for such tales of woe, my child.”

  “I’m eighteen.”

  “Oh, in that case, you don’t need an adult present. They killed my brother Herb about ten years ago in Amsterdam.”

  “What happened?”

  Gunn felt suddenly full of angst. “I do not want to talk about it.”

  The girl pouted and decided to have a meaningless conversation with a pizza delivery guy later that night.

  “Oh, and can you remove all the thorns from the roses for me?” Gunn asked thornily.

  A few minutes later, the girl’s hands completely punctured and bloody and therefore unattractive to even the most desperate pizza delivery guy, Gunn drove the new Geo Storm to his house, ninety-two dozen roses packed into the back seat.

  Johnny did some math and decided that 1,104 roses would so fit in the back of a Geo Storm, but only if Gunn drove with all the windows open. I don’t want to get any hate mail from readers fussing over the bleeding roses, as if any of them had every put over a thousand roses into the back of anything.

  On
his drive home, Gunn planned the fireworks to come. He’d say, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty,” and Cat would purr and say, “Meow.” She would then slink across the floor on her hands and knees in the Catwoman suit she wore to protect her second- and third-degree burns. Then she’d rub her back against his legs. “Have you been a good kitty or a naughty kitty?” he’d ask, and she’d say, “Meow” again, only this time very cattily.

  Suddenly, his romantic thoughts were interrupted by

  Johnny interrupted himself. By what? By reality? By a coherent thought? By real fireworks? Johnny shook his head, finally realizing that it was just as hard to keep a relationship going in a book as it was in real life. He heard a siren somewhere in the distance.

  He smiled and deleted the previous phrase.

  Suddenly, sirens interrupted Gunn’s romantic thoughts. Miles of police tape circled his mansion like little, thin, yellow, plastic children playing “Ring around the Rosie.” He leaped out of the new Geo Storm like a man-sized bullfrog who ate Wheaties and felt the turmoil of tumultuous emotions. He had a jillion emotions going through his mind, all of them extremely emotional and emotionally draining.

  He ducked under some police tape near his porch and ran smack dab into an Irish cop named Shamus O’Malley.

  “What happened here?” Gunn asked by happenstance.

  “Is this your house?” O’Malley asked residentially with an Irish brogue, kicking his little legs together and cackling like a leprechaun.

  “Yes, this is my house,” Gunn said domestically.

  “It’s also a crime scene, lad,” O’Malley said criminally.

  A crime scene! Gunn thought excitedly. Here? At my house? Today? It can’t be! I have laundry to do! “Where’s my Cat?”

  “I didn’t know you had one, so it must have run off,” O’Malley said, running his Irish mouth in a runny and offhand manner.

  Gunn smiled catatonically. “I don’t have a cat, Officer O’Malley. Do I look like a cat man to you? Huh, huh, huh.”

  O’Malley joined him with ironic Irish laughter gilded with angst.

  “My girlfriend’s name is Cat.”

  “So you’re the boyfriend?” O’Malley asked boyishly.

  Gunn nodded. “I am the boyfriend. I brought her some roses.” He pointed at the back of the new Geo Storm.

  Officer O’Malley looked at the roses. “They look like some empty stems to me.”

  “It was windy,” Gunn said breezily.

  “It might have had something to do with you having the windows open,” O’Malley said openly. “Son, we need to talk.”

  Gunn blinked fifty times in a minute, the international sign that he was totally clueless, confused, nervous, or had something in his eye. He was glad he wasn’t a parrot (twenty-six blinks per minute), a newborn baby (two blinks per minute), or an ostrich (one blink per minute), and that calmed him somewhat, but he couldn’t stop thinking thoughtful thoughts.

  Is Officer O’Malley my long-lost father? Gunn thought. He called me his son just now! Am I Irish? Is it why I like the color green so much? Is it why I root for the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team even though those guys come in as blue chip NFL prospects and go out as undrafted free agents thanks to horrendous coaching by guys who look like Rodney Dangerfield? Is it why I like women who have green eyes? Is it why I think little people live under stairs, eat cereal filled with marshmallows, and have magical powers? Is it why I prefer weeping to laughing, wool to cotton, and redheads to brunettes? Is it why I want to be the middleweight boxing champion of the world someday?

  “Are you my father, Officer O’Malley?” Gunn asked paternally.

  “No, son,” O’Malley said, suddenly full of darkness.

  “Dad?”

  Officer O’Malley took a little silver flask, which magically never emptied, from his pocket and inhaled a long swig of Irish whiskey. “‘Son’ is just a stereotypical Irish cop expression designed to keep you calm before I tell you some really, seriously awful, you’re gonna be really, really angry bad news.”

  “Oh.” Gunn had a sinking feeling. That’s when he realized that he needed to replace a few sagging boards on his porch. Lousy contractors, Gunn thought. Always substituting inferior 6.0 Eastern white pine when they run out of Western red cedar.

  “Your girlfriend Cat had some seriously nice stems,” O’Malley said seriously and nicely.

  “Thank you,” Gunn said thankfully.

  “Your roses were once lovely, son, but she’ll never see them,” O’Malley said blindly.

  “You don’t mean …”

  Officer O’Malley nodded.

  Gunn crumpled to the porch like a three-piece suit made of crêpe paper and recycled toilet tissue. “She’s blind? I just bought her that contact lens! Was it recalled without my knowledge? I thought most recalls were for toys and cribs covered with lead-based paint from mainland China, where pollution is rampant, freedom is just another word, and they have far too many people!”

  “Yes, they are, son.”

  “Dad?”

  “No.” Officer O’Malley helped Gunn to his feet. “I can see you have some deep seated father issues. I’ll just call you ‘me lad’ from now on.”

  “OK.”

  “Me lad, she’s not blind,” O’Malley said not as blindly.

  “St. Patrick be praised!” Gunn shouted trickily.

  “St. Patrick came to Ireland, me lad,” O’Malley said outlandishly. “Thus, he wasn’t Irish.”

  “Oh. Um, what was he?” Gunn asked all in one-syllable words.

  “Probably Swedish or Scandinavian,” O’Malley said unintelligibly. “He talked with an indecipherable accent and claimed he wrote Nobel Prize-deserving books.”

  “Oh,” Gunn said shortly.

  “So, she’s not blind, me lad,” O’Malley said visually. “It’s worse.”

  Gunn crumpled to the porch like the Constitution during the first, second, and third Bush presidencies. “I am feeling severe angst.”

  “It will pass,” O’Malley said in passing. “She’s gone, me lad.”

  “Gone?”

  “She has left the building,” O’Malley said rightly.

  “She walked out on me?” Gunn cried out. “I mean, I have her new Geo Storm, so she would have had to walk on her seriously nice stems, and with all her second- and third-degree burns, I doubt seriously that she could walk very far.”

  “No, me lad,” O’Malley said in a negative tone. “She’s resting in the arms of Jesus.”

  “She ran away with my accountant?” Gunn gasped unaccountably.

  Officer O’Malley shook his head. “I said Gee-zuss, not hey-Zeus.”

  Gunn pursed his lips. “That’s the way my accountant says his name.”

  “Your accountant has a messiah complex, does he?” O’Malley asked with complexity in a messianic way.

  “Don’t they all?” Gunn mused. “His full name is Jesus God, if that’s any indication. His real name was Romulus Remus, but he paid to have it changed.”

  “Fascinating,” Officer O’Malley said irreverently. “But Cat didn’t run off with Jesus. She’s wandering Jordan’s bank and the Stygian shore, she’s pushing up peonies, she’s off to the happy hunting grounds, and she has sung her own requiem. She is defunct, non-operational, permanently stagnant, and torpid.”

  “You don’t mean …”

  “She is a stiff, she’s ripe for the cutting, ready the rib spreader, she’s primed to be embalmed, better call the funeral home, write that obituary, she’s prepared to biodegrade.”

  “You can’t mean …”

  “She’s dead as a doornail, she has kicked her last bucket, and she’s dead and gooey as the potatoes in Ireland during the blight that forced my ancestors to flee to Boston to root for the Celtics against our will.”

  Gunn crumpled to his knees like Cost-Cutter aluminum foil, you know, the kind that never tears in a straight line, and no matter how careful you are, when you pull out exactly the amount you need, it still
tears like snaggle-teeth and no longer fits the container you’re trying to wrap, and then you have to tear off another piece to cover the open spots, which is a conspiracy, I tell you, a scam that cuts less cost and even more aluminum foil!

  “I feel your angst,” Officer O’Malley said metallically and rapidly.

  “Why?!?!?!” Gunn exclaimed questioningly and markedly. “Why did she have to die?!?!?!”

  “Well, me lad, she bled out, stopped breathing, and became brain dead,” O’Malley said breathily in a brainy manner.

  Gunn looked up. “She was kind of like that when she was alive!”

  “Not like this,” Officer O’Malley said naughtily. “I counted thirty-four bullet holes along with a fierce looking infected hangnail on her left ring finger.”

  Gunn curled into the fetal position and sucked his thumb since he didn’t have a cigar handy to chew on. “What will I do with all the roses?”

  “They’ll look lovely on her casket, me lad,” Officer O’Malley said lovingly.

  And they did, all eighty-seven dozen that had survived the windy trip to Gunn’s mansion. One of the roses, the very last one, the rose in his very hand, that rose …

  Johnny smiled. It’s about time I had a symbol to overdevelop and beat to death. That’s also part of the romance novelist’s “code.” Let’s see how nauseating I can make this.

  One of the roses, the very last one, the rose in his very hand, that rose cut his palm as he gripped it while hugging the casket. The thorn cut deep into his very soul, into his very marrow, into even his DNA, RNA, a ribosome or two, and his endoplasmic reticulum, creating a wound from which he knew he would never recover, a wound he would take to his grave, a wound that his law firm would turn into a multimillion-dollar lawsuit just for the fun of it to tie up the American court system well into the second half of the twenty-second century.

  “Oh, my love, my love, my love … is like a red, red rose,” Gunn whispered readily.

  Gunn suddenly had an epiphany, and it hit him like a bolt of lightning jolting a Sunday golfer right in the heel of his seven-iron. Am I Scottish then? Who quotes Robert Burns at funerals but the Scottish, Presbyterians, and professors of British Neoclassic and Romantic poetry? I like golf. I drink tea. I look good in plaid. I walk around in a fog. I like skirts. Maybe I’m Scotch and Irish!