Story Every Day #9: Love Blossom

I'm right now on the west side of Florida, the farthest west I have ever got in this state. What is it like here? It is like this: the moisture in the air rushes to your skin and doesn't leave. The palm trees sprawl bright in the sky and half the roads are torn up and marked with construction tape. I'm in the guest room of someone else's rented house and the DVD player just unexpectedly threw its tray out at me, then sucked it back in.

Here's a story for you. It's called Love Blossom.

Each time he fell in love a new appendage sprouted. The dogs he kept as a child didn't mind or even notice but his first high school girlfriend fingered the fingers coming out of his back and never again asked him to pull off his shirt. By the time he got it off again, in college, an entire tiny leg hung from his ribs. He usually kept it duct taped to his side but still, you could tell. At his wedding the next year he was lumpy in his tux next to a woman who had seen all of him. He thought this was the worst of the curse but the worst of it was to come in the following years, when he'd come home from meeting the IT woman with a new thumb behind his knee, and later from a week-long training in Dallas with something he didn't recognize lumpy on his foot. His wife would draw back in bed and he would guide her hand to the one she'd given him, on his shoulder. This is the only one that matters, he'd say, but even he wouldn't believe that was true.