Lost In This Moment

     For Dr. Dial-Driver's Pop Market. This flashfiction assignment was a romance, and the structural commands were that it had to be exactly one page long. So I snuck around the double-space-everything-in-MLA-format rule by writing half of this story in poetry, because poetry can be single-spaced. Because it's me, I knew that the title would be influenced by country music somehow, so the title is borrowed from a Keith Anderson song that Big & Rich later covered. The cover is the better-known version of the tune.

While the swing goes on in the predestined way –

endlessly pacing, like all such furniture must journey –

the background  fills with our friends’ chatter,

someone’s klutzy dog makes quite a clatter,

and I’m one lucky dog with a brand-new fiancée. 

Clasped hands and hearts on that old porch swing; Desiree,  

is it this song that’s such an enchanter?

Don’t answer aloud – let your gaze say

while the swing goes on.

Years from now, this moment will stay

in my favorite memories, thinking of last Saturday,

and though in years ahead we’ll weather paint splatters

and deal with your mom – drat her -

but they’ll be counterbalanced by moments of play  

while the swing goes on.

      This was the rondeau that Mike wrote for his wife Desiree in their hotel room one night on their honeymoon. He had proposed to her while they were at a Fourth of July party hosted by friends; they were snuggled on the creaky porch swing in the Allans’ backyard, and it finally seemed like the right time to ask – they’d survived their first year of school, (they’d figure out the transfer details later) and there was family housing. Most people would say they were crazy, but if their grandparents had made it work so young, why couldn’t they? He set her guitar back into its case (he’d been using as a desk) and tucked the poem between the strings where she’d notice it first thing. Then shaking his head, wonderstruck that this was real life, he slipped under the covers. She grunted sleepily and loosened her grip on the comforter.