Young Love
I am 58 years old. My fiancee, Holly, is 18. Some people might look askance at our relationship, because of the age difference. But what they don’t realize is how much Holly and I have in common: We both like to have sex a lot, we both like to make out in public, and we both like to drink heavily.
Holly’s father is 37. I don’t think he cares for me too much. I get along much better with Holly’s grandfather, Carl, who’s a few years younger than me.
Holly’s father finally gave his consent to our marriage. I guess he figured if he was going to run into me, in the middle of the night, in the hallway, in my underpants, I might as well be his son-in-law.
Holly and I set a wedding date. That’s when all kinds of second thoughts entered my head. I wondered if Holly would still be attractive to me when she got into her 20’s? Or her 30’s? I wondered if we should wait until she finished high school. And if she did finish, should we go to the senior prom? Lord knows I love to get out on the dance floor and rock out with the young people, but would they be serving alcohol?
As I was mulling all this over, disaster struck from out of nowhere. My wife showed up. I thought she was dead! It turned out she was 92 years old, but very much alive. You may be wondering what I was doing married to a 92-year-old woman. But when we first got married, it wasn’t that strange: I was 15 and she was in her late forties. We were happy for a few years, but then I started fooling around with her sister, Phyllis. I heard Phyllis has Alzheimer’s now.
Holly was very understanding. She said we would just wait until my wife died. But hours turned into days, and days turned into weeks, but my wife wouldn’t die. What I did next, I know now, was wrong. Holly has a four-year-old son, Toby. I drove him over to my wife’s house, gave him a gun, and told him to go shoot her. I guess he got mixed up, because he shot her dog, who was 150 years old in dog years.
So now I’m in jail. I asked Holly to wait for me, but she said she couldn’t. I heard she’s going with some guy who’s 19. (Yeah, that’ll last.) I was depressed for a while, but I try to keep myself busy in the prison library. Last week I came across an article in one of the higher-class supermarket tabloids. It said this scientist had obtained a few strands of Marie Antoinette’s hair, and he planned to clone her. I wrote to him and reserved one of the clones. It wasn’t cheap — five hundred dollars — but I think it will be worth it. I have always been attracted to Marie Antoinette, from paintings of her and from pornographic drawings of the day.
So when she’s 18 years old, and I’m out of prison, I plan on marrying Marie Antoinette’s clone. I wrote to my congressman asking him to introduce a bill allowing you to marry a 15-year-old clone, but I never heard back from him. Come on, she’s a clone! Friends tell me, what if you wait all that time and Marie Antoinette doesn’t want to marry you? I guess all you can do is shrug and go, “Well, that’s young love.”
Jack Handey was a writer for Saturday Night Live, and he is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs.
His latest book, My Funny Cowboy Dance, is a new collection of short humor pieces. Find all his books at deepthoughtsbyjackhandey.com
