Searching For the Perfect Woman. (standard:romance, 1979 words)
Author: Oscar A Rat	Added: Jul 04 2020	Views/Reads: 1340/963	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Shawn spends much of his life searching for a perfect mate.

Mary Jablonsky paused to throw an errant blond curl back from her left
eye before narrowing both at her son, Shawn, sitting across the 
breakfast table.  "I wish you'd settle down a bit, son," she told him, 
"find a good girl and stop all this wild dating.  You've yet to go out 
with one long enough to even introduce her to me.  It's no way for a 
boy to live." 

"I'm trying, Ma.  It's just ... only, well ... none of them seem to
satisfy me." 

"Both your sisters, even Sandra, three years younger than you, are
happily married.  Ellen even has two kids, and all you do is flutter 
from one floozy to another, like a butterfly." 

"The right one will come along, sometime or other.  I know she's out
there, Ma, waiting for me to find her.  I can even picture her in my 
mind, as though ... I dunno, like I know she's waiting." 

"That one, Jenny, you told me about last month.  She seemed perfect to
you.  You were bugging me for days." 

"Yeah.  I thought so too ... at first."  He stopped for a few minutes,
to finish his eggs and toast.  "But she has that squeaky laugh.  It was 
driving me up the walls." 

*** 

"Hey, man.  Where you get that fox?"  Dwayne, his best friend, asked. 
"Steer her my way when you're done with her.  She's a keeper." 

"How about tomorrow?  I can't stand blondes, and she's got that habit of
constantly twitching her eyebrows.  Not my type." 

"You're nuts, man.  You'll kick her out of bed for 'twitching' her
eyebrows?  Jeez, but you are a nut." 

"Keep her if you want.  My dream girl will be along soon.  I can feel
it." 

That was at twenty.  At age forty, he felt exactly the same way,
searching for Ms. Right.  However, by that time needing to make a 
living and with thick glasses and a receding hairline, the wait was 
becoming more difficult. 

Meanwhile, his mother had died of breast cancer and sister Sandy
divorced.  Shawn found himself relegated to a back desk at a large data 
processing company, working the night shift. 

He kept up his search, though often too tired in the daylight to look
very hard.  He was still convinced he would find his dream girl, 
somewhere, somehow.  That she was waiting for him, somewhere over the 
next rainbow. 

He still retained that vivid picture in his mind, though it was often
obscured within a dreamy white mist.   Various illegal drugs he was 
taking to stay alert didn't help a whole lot. 

At first, Shawn began popping stay-awake pills to help him work nights. 
He spent his time alone in a cubicle outside the Computer Room – 
babysiting a large mainframe computer. 

Those occasional pills escalated into snorts of powdered cocaine.  He
had the money and it was better than the caffeine-based pills.  The 
coke even helped his programming, making problem solving seem easier.  
Increased productivity gained him promotions, meaning more money.  
Knowing his coke use would be curtailed in the presence of other 
employees, Shawn even refused a change to the day shift. 

*** 

Early one morning, after parking in a slum area to buy an ounce or two
of coke, his pusher was late.  The sales were done in an abandoned 
house where many not only bought their drug of choice, but found a 
corner in which to use it – then to come back to the bedroom where the 
pusher worked for another dosage. 


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