Why Kate don't date

 

 

Kate was a beautiful, shapely mother of one. Kate was a snappy dresser who wore a lot of gold wraps and tight sarongs to show off her figure. Everyone said Kate was quite a catch. Smart, funny, self-reliant, the total package. 

Kate's love life left something to be desired, though. Her friends kept trying to set her up on blind dates, but these dates seldom got past the initial moments of meeting before the suitor would go running from the restaurant screaming in terror. 

The problem with Kate was that, while working as a physicist, studying black holes and the like, due to an accident with the particle accelerator, Kate was left with a permanent disfigurement which was impossible to conceal. 

Kate was a human fly. 

Her head was the normal size for a human, but had enormous, honeycomb eyes, and hairy, tentacle-like sense organs protruding from her lower mandible. 

I know I said she was beautiful. I meant that in the past tense, as in "Kate was beautiful before she became a human/insect hybrid freak." She might still be beautiful to certain entomologists, but so far, no one could tolerate more than a few moments in her presence. I wasn't about to be the first exception. 

We'd been set up by a mutual friend, and I went to meet her at the diner. She was wearing her gold wraps and tight sarong. On her head she wore something resembling a beekeepers headdress, or one of those masks people wear while fencing. It was just large enough and obnoxious enough to detract from the otherwise lovely picture of this single mother with baby in tow, sitting at a booth in the local diner. 

I spied her just as she was looking up to catch my eye, although there was no telling which of her many tiny eyes had caught sight of me when I'd first walked in the door. This wasn't gonna work out, but I felt trapped. I couldn't keep walking, since she'd obviously recognized me as her blind date. 

She picked up her baby and swaddled it, just to provide an extra layer of guilt should I decide to turn tail and run. How could I just abandon this lovely young mother to another embarrassing failed date just because I couldn't stomach what I knew was going on under that beekeepers mask? I wavered and, thankfully, I woke up from this dream before any kind of commitment was required out of me. 

What was I supposed to do, anyway? Keep on pretending to ignore the reality of her freakish appearance forever? Marry her and have little human fly babies, which would undoubtedly have trouble in daycare, and in every other social situation for the rest of their lives? How long would they live, anyway? Would they retain the longevity profile from their human mother or would they have the shortened lifespan of a fly from their insect DNA? These are questions never to be answered...and best not asked in...The Twilight Zone.  

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I know I should give the next announcement top billing, perhaps give it a separate post in some gratitude journal, but I'll just jot it in here, since I've got this problem with the whole "gratitude at gunpoint" thing. But here is my announcement:

MY CHRISTMAS STYE IS GONE!!! I've been using the erythromycin ointment for 8 days and it has now become almost imperceptible. The chalazione is also around 80% better and looks less and less noticeable each day. I'll keep using the ointment on the right eye for a few more days and perhaps that will become a memory soon as well. This is something that went better than expected, almost as good as could be hoped for.

I'm getting a bit of something left over from last night's dream. Wait. Something about me working in a giant hospital. It was a vintage, art deco style building and had way too many empty hallways and confusing corridors. I don't know what I was supposed to be doing there, or how it figured in to my date with Kate the fly-lady, so that's all I can say about it.