Love Story by Maria Romaniuk

His glistening bald head,

Margaret mused, contained history within. It was a thick and sturdy head, flushed with healthy pink. Good genes. Not like Roger's or Clive’s or her father's. It was rich soil, capable of housing many a follicle. She could imagine him twenty years prior, boasting a head of luscious golden hair. She derived strange melancholic amusement from picturing Bertram in the autumn of his life – just before now, she presumed – when the hair, methodically, unflinchingly, began to leave him, to the horror of its admirers. She pictured a crowd of same-faced, same-voiced mourners wailing at the inevitability of change, as if personally wronged by it, lamenting Bertram's bygone glory.

But Margaret was not a shallow woman, unaddicted to transient beauties. Margaret liked the permanent core. Margaret liked his eyes, which shone with undying youth and grounded wisdom. A teacher, she presumed. An intellectual, worn or out and disheartened by the vicious pressure of the environment, grasping for the dwindling flames of his former academic passion. Soft-spoken, perhaps, with a velvety voice. Three ex-wives. Three? Too many. He's not a philanderer. One ex-wife – death did them part, not boredom or infidelity, those lowly, uncouth things. He remembers her fondly. He keeps her gentle spirit in a secluded socket of his heart. The rest of it – the heart – is free and open and waiting.

“Are you ordering anything, ma'am?”

This stranger's undying loyalty, Margaret thought. The permanent presence of his glorious bald head in her vicinity.

“Just water, please”.