Needy Greedy Love (Part 9)

And those roses did, all eighty-seven 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 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!

Only Gunn and Father Time, an ancient Italian priest, attended Cat's funeral. Father Time said quite a few random things about Cat, like how he knew she was this and that and the other, almost as if he knew her very, very well, and this made Gunn feel even more angst.

I hardly knew ye at all! Gunn whimpered dialectically in his mind. If we only had more time! That's all I wanted! More time! And more thyme! You made my life spicy! I wish this were leap year! I wish the earth would stop rotating on its axis so we'd all fly off the planet at 200 miles per hour!

Father Time shook Gunn's trembling hands with eerily cold and clammy hands. "She was a fine woman, son."

"Dad?"

"No, I am a man of the cloth."

"Oh. Um, cotton?"

"Polyester blend," Father Time said. "Cotton makes me itch."

And then, it began to rain as it usually does at all movie funerals to provide the rainmakers jobs, I suppose, and lend gravity and mud and little dots of water to the camera lenses, all of which, I suppose, is to make the cinematic experience more realistic. The rain was heavy. It soaked him. Gunn was wet. He was sodden. He dripped. He felt the cold seeping into his bones. His bones ached. The rain had a sixty percent chance of turning into snow, and it did, instantaneously coating the mound of dirt under which lay his love, his soul mate, his sweet patootie, Cat Mann.

Gunn would never forget her. He would mourn her for the rest of his life. He would adopt kittens and tell them the epic story of his and Cat's two-week-long torrid love affair over some catnip and Friskies Buffet. He would go on a pilgrimage to Kathmandu. He would meet Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. He would never marry. He would become a Scotch-Irish priest who wore polyester blends and called men "son" to mess with their heads and put them into years of psychotropic drug therapy.

The next day, however, Gunn would meet Thais Knotts, and unbeknownst to her and to him, Thais Knotts would be his true truelove and mother of his unborn child, Sparky.

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