The Proposal

“There’s something I’ve been w-w-wanting to ask you for a v-very long time.”

He drops to one knee and gazes up at her— the crack of half-smile on his lips and the threat of a tear in his eye.

His smile widens and now the tear is real. It shimmers and then spills and falls down his cheek.

She gasps.

He laughs. “G-God! I’ve b-been dreaming of asking this question for years. But now we’re here, I don’t know how to s-s-say it. You do that to me you know. Even still. I mean hell! I’m… I’m… I’m… shit. I am closer to you than to any other human on earth, and we’ve done all the things lovers d-do. You’re the m-most important person in my world. But somehow, I’m still shy around you when it comes to real m-moments like this. Still c-cl-clumsy when it comes to getting my w-words out! You deserve raw beautiful poetry, but instead you’ve got me and my… my… my d-damned stutter.”

She feels her heart beat quicken, she can almost hear her own pulse drumming behind the cords of her neck.

Looking down at his smile, it’s obvious what’s coming. He’s finally going to propose, and the whole thing has caught her entirely off guard.

They have been together for years and she had actually realized long ago that she would spend the rest of her life with him.

But somehow she hadn’t actually expected this moment.

A proposal?

How is it that he still manages to surprise her, after all these years?

She doesn’t know how to react.

The whole thing is too surreal.

It’s almost like she’s a spectator watching through the eyes of someone else’s body.

She thinks back to when she was a little girl, how she’d fantasized about the perfect proposal, the perfect wedding, the perfect husband.

Distantly, she notes this is not what she had dreamed.

Her fingers begin to shake.

She clenches them into fists, to stop the trembling.

She tries to catch her breath. But she moans, the way she always does whenever they’re together and whenever her need begins to well up.

She moans “Goddamn it. I need some.”

“I know w-what you want, sweetie pie. But our p-p-passion will have to wait. I have more to s-say.”

He reaches into his back pocket and brings forth a gorgeous ring, it catches the light in a million ways and seems to glimmer like a star in the dim of her room.

“Long before I was b-born my grandfather pr-proposed with this very r-ring, then my f-f-f…. Then my Dad inhereited it when my g-grandmother p-p-passed away. He used it to pr-or-propose to my… mother. Right after she gave birth to m-m-me. But she…”

His eyes seem to wilt. Another tear traces the line from his first, but this second tear is fatter and as it falls she notices him wince. “But she… sh-sh-she rejected him. She ran away. She-she-she fucking abandoned us. Abandoned m-me. And when D-dad gave me this r-ring he m-m-made me p-promise to redeem it. He s-said ‘don’t waste it on a s-s-sssstupid whore like your m-mother. Only propose to someone who deserves your l-love. And someone who deserves your N-Nana’s ring.’”

He raises the ring between two fingers, delicately, as if it were a communion host. He looks at it then he looks at her and his smile returns.

“He always told me I’d b-be the one to reclaim the m-meaning of this heirloom. For m-most men getting d-down on one knee and offering a r-r-ring is just a s-silly ritual. It’s a ritual for me too, but not a silly one. To me this is everything that my Dad told me not to w-waste. I told myself I’d never pro-propose to a woman unless I was certain she would s-s-say yes.”

The full weight of the moment hits her, and she can hardly believe they’ve come to this.

She still doesn’t know what to say.

But looking down at his earnest smile, her heart hurts.

Her own tears begin to fall.

“Oh, baby d-don’t cry! N-not for me. I know my life has been sad. B-but that was before you! Living with you has made m-m-me happier than I have any right to be!”

Some snot drips from his nose, he sniffles and wipes it away with the back of his hand and laughs.

“God! I s-said I’d be clumsy, but this is w-worse. I’m a mess! Ever since the moment I laid eyes on you I knew y-you would be the one for me-me. Our l-l-life together has been bliss. I don’t w-want anyone else. Only y-y-you.”

She can’t catch her breath.

The moment is too much, she feels lightheaded.

Seeing him grinning up at her; with his big, adoring eyes is making her whole body tingle. She feels almost as anxious and jittery as she did the first night he brought her home.

He says, “You are my everything. You’ve already made me the happiest m-man alive, just by living here and by l-loving me. But let’s make it official! I n-need to be yours f-for-forever. W-will you m-marry m-m-me?”

Tears flow down her face, she cannot take anymore.

She bucks against her restraints.

She tries to shake her head no.

But he pushes a button on his laptop, and the machinery behind her bed whirs to life.

She feels that old, familiar rush of serum entering her veins through the IV, a cold trickle up her arm.

She begins to salivate, like always.

Her tensions melt.

Her heart beat slows and that lazy, relaxed, cursed warmth builds to a pulse in her chest.

Drool begins to leak from her mouth.

That heat drifts towards her navel and down, lower.

She tries to squeeze her legs shut but that familiar, damned laziness has spread through her body and she flops into a relaxed position, legs splayed against the buckles and straps.

He says “Don’t leave me w-waiting. I l-love you and I n-need to know. Will you m-marry me?”

She looks down at him and she groans. Under the effects of the drug, his face bulges and contorts, his eyes inflate and he looks like the closeup of a bug under a lens— some disgusting, microscopic thing now blown to hideous proportions…

His broad smile is all teeth and she wishes his jaw would unhinge and part wider, wider, wider, until it gapes wide enough to snap backwards and engulf his whole face! How she’d love to see him die bleeding and gushing from his own rotten gums.

She sees him in grotesque detail now, but in a casual way. He might as well be on the other side of the planet.

He says it again and his stuttering voice comes to her like an echo from beneath the waters of an ocean ten thousand miles distant:

“Will you m-marry m-me-me?”

Gone as she is, she is still lucid enough to want to say no.

She hates the idea of giving him the satisfaction.

There was a time when she’d have fought with every ounce of her consciousness. But she has learned what it is to be helpless and to be hopeless.

She needs to maximize the illusion of escape.

She knows this high will not last forever.

She needs that second dose, to prolong the dissociation.

She needs it before he…

Before he…

She just needs that second dose.

She knows she is a puppet, his puppet.

And she hates knowing that he can pluck her strings to make her dance any which way he chooses.

But life here in her room— in his basement— is hell: long periods of darkness, offset by brief flashes of medicine.

Her only relief, this chemical cocktail that dances between her neurons right now.

And none of these thoughts are articulated beyond a quiet buzz, dulled and muffled by the action of the drugs.

She wants to shake her head no, but her head is a million pounds and before she can muster the strength to raise it even an inch, she forgets what she was trying to do anyway.

Flowers can’t talk so well.

No vocal cords. No tongue.

No brains.

Just xylem and phloem.

And sap.

The task of speaking, it makes her petals wilt.

But she tries anyway.

Her slack lips smack together slowly.

She gives it her all:

A bubble of spit.

And a bubble of memory, rising to the surface of her swirling mind: her pet goldfish. Back when she was a little girl.

Her per goldfish, dying in the open air.

Lips smacking.

She hadn’t wanted to hurt him. She had thought he might like to be petted. So she had scooped him out of his tank and set him in the floor.

But Mr. Shimmer had flopped around ao much she had started to panic and so she had tried to pick him up but the net wouldn’t work on the carpet and he’d been too slippery for her fingers.

And she had watched until he had stopped gasping.

His lips.

Like hers.

Smacking.

And when he had stopped gasping and flopping she had plucked the dust bunnies from his gills and plopped him back into his tank.

But she doesn’t have to worry about any of that now. She’s not a little girl anymore.

Now she is a flower and all she has to worry about is saying that one word.

The why doesn’t matter.

She knows she must.

She furrows her stem, a great effort of concentration.

Petals flex.

The word spills from her mouth, along with a little slurry of drool: “yes.”

She doesn’t know who said that. Or what they said yes to.

And from way up here in the trees she sees a little insect in the grass below: buzzing and pestering a flower.

The insect whines and stutters something about the flower making him the happiest wretched thing in the galaxy.

And the ugly little bug strips off its chitinous shell and presses its gooey pink insides against those distant petals.

That hideous fly is trying to steal nectar.

But even that thought is fading.

She wonders if insects can choke.

She hopes so.

Then she looks to the sky because there’s nothing happening down below.

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Authors note:

This is based off a horror poem I wrote a while back. I expanded the idea of course, shifted the perspectives and tone around until I landed on something I felt was terrible/icky enough to work as a more fully fleshed out story.

The original poem was deliberately symbolic of the ways in which the body’s naturally occurring neurotransmitters and impulses can really hijack and override our more conscious/ willful intentions.

Originally this came from some dark thoughts about how easy it is to get/ feel trapped in a bad relationship, if one allows themselves to become addicted to the rush of physicality.

This story adaptation doesn’t make much of an effort to comment on the original theme of that poem, but instead takes the central idea of being drugged into a suggestible “zombie” state and tries to expand it into a darker narrative where there’s less symbolic commentary about real relationships and more straightforward revulsion.

This was written around the prompt for the “Rituals of Affection” Vocal challenge, which asks for stories about a ritual associated with romance or love, along with a sense that something about this ritual is “unsettling” or wrong.

Of course this story features the surface level ritual of proposing with a Diamond ring. But to me the deeper, unstated ritual is the protag’s forced reliance on a chemical escape, which I wrote with addiction in mind.

Depressing as it may be to think about, most forms of addiction are steeped in ritual, even when they feel like survival mechanisms.

Pretty uncomfortable to write about any of this stuff, so I’m having trouble determining whether the story works. The content just feels too gross for me to look over and edit the way I intended, at least for the moment.

I was hoping the arc would seem like a legit proposal until the reveal, but that a second read would show her supposed excitement was actually fear, anger, and some level of chemical withdrawal all along. But I can’t actually read it start to finish, so I can’t say whether it turned out how I’d hoped.

Also, in a technical sense this writing was pretty new for me, especially the last bit where the main character is falling into the hallucinations of her drug induced, dissociative trance.

I really don’t know if any of this works the way I intended, wide open to feedback of any kind, especially eager to hear what I might have done differently to make the writing more effective.

Please don’t hesitate to let me know! Any and all criticism is fair game.

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Here’s the poem if you’re curious to see how the story was rewritten from the original concept:

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Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day!

If you’re hunting more stories on the theme of ritual, try browsing other peoples submissions to this challenge here:

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