When Zacharriah fell in love he did not know what it was that he had fallen in love with.

He knew that she was most charming when she was trying to decide from a menu, when she would bite her lower lip and go through the itemized list with a perfect finger. He knew that he thought that she moved through the world – again, most charmingly – in a state unpredictably fluctuating between majestic arrogance and abject self-pity. He knew that she wore her watch most distinctly on her slim right wrist and always, rather elegantly, put on her left shoe first. He knew the size of that shoe, and the size of her ring. His knowledge about the little details, had he told anyone about them, would surely strike the listener as being just this side of a restraining order.

But he didn’t know what it was that he had fallen in love with.

Which was not surprising, really, because after meeting her, he did not seem to know much about anything else at all.

Upon their first meeting, through a mutual friend, he remembered himself as being usually shy and characteristically at a loss for words. She assured him, constantly, that she had been very much as charmed by him as he had been by her, though they both knew that he felt an insistent desire to prove himself the knight that should have swept her off her feet, as, of course, was deserving of her. That first meeting, wherewith the mutual friend had provided most of the conversation – while one sat in embarrassed blush and the other in polite amusement – had also provided Zacharriah, after a discreet inquiry, with the knowledge that she was, miraculously, single.

He pursued. She yielded willingly.

The morning after their second meeting Zacharriah bid her a flustered goodbye, uncertain if he would ever again be bless’d with the sight of her. That uncertainty expanded, not so much a butterfly as, mayhaps, a moth from its cocoon, and he debated with himself apropos the implications of that dark, wet night. He was not totally inexperienced in the arena of love, though he was unlearn’d of its protocols and which of them perforce applied in a situation such as this. One swallow does not the summer make, he reasoned, however happy that swallow may be. Should he call her again, he decided, she would surely get the impression that he was interested solely in her body. But if he did not…

He took the course of action that he was most familiar with, that is, none at all. Another gnawing fact surfaced in the steadily accumulating case for the prosecution, being the certainty that he was, in actuality, not interested solely in her body, however soft and marvelous that body had proven herself to being. When the scent and the taste of her faded enough to accommodate other thoughts, he discovered that, during the course of the night in question, he had enjoyed himself to a degree, well, unsurpassed in previous experience, at least without aid Bacchanalian. She was, in affect, captivating. He wondered if he had fallen for her, unaware that the first hours of their long conversation had been the sound of him rushing towards terminal velocity.

Other, less pressing, issues – real life – proved to be an unwelcome distraction, but he managed to continue his circular deliberation over the course of three days; that is, three days if one counted the day when he last saw her, and not the evening before when they had met. The issue was finally resolved at the end of that tumultuous period when she called him.

“Zach?” she begun.

“Yes?” he said, suddenly nervous at hearing her unmistakably mellifluous voice. Would she blame him for not calling her?

“I left…” she hesitated.

“I noticed,” he said, a trifle too quickly, and hit himself on the forehead with his palm. “I mean, er, what do you mean, you left?”

“I left something at your place,” she said, the words coming out in a tumble.

“You did?” he asked, his surprise evident, “I never found anything. What was it?”

The pause stretched out, and he walked to his bed, where she had spent the entirety of her visit. Like a significant number of his gender who lived alone, his bed was never made, and he found the missing object beneath his pillow, a small ball of black satin or silk in the corner. He unraveled it, held it up before him and proclaimed, simply, “Oh.”

“You found it?” she said.

“Yes–”

“Look, it would be absolutely horrible if you were to think I left it there on purpose.”

“Like a souvenir or something?” he said, finding himself oddly fascinated.

“Yes! I mean, no. I mean, I’m not the kind of girl who does that sort of thing.”

“That sort of thing with me?”

“Yes. I mean, I did it, obviously, and I have done it before. But I’m not the kind of girl who would do it, see?”

“I see,” he said, deciding that life had taken a mark’d turn for the surreal and it’d be easier to keep up if he went with her flow.

“Good, because I wouldn’t want you to think that I was.”

“I don’t. Don’t worry about it.”

“That’s good,” she paused. “Ehrm, that’s good,” she repeated.

“They sell these in Japan, you know,” he said, filling the lull in conversation with the first thing he could think of, “mail-order. They have this catalogue of schoolgirls and they’ll wear it while they… get… off…” he could see his points dwindling rapidly before his eyes. “They sell these in Japan,” he weakly finished.

“Do you like schoolgirls, then?” she asked, the amused confidence in her tone surfacing.

Surreal, definitely surreal. “I guess you’ll want it back, then, since I’m not meant to have it?”

“Is tonight good for you? Dinner and coffee? I wouldn’t want you to meet me just to hand a… package.”

“Dinner and coffee.”

“Tonight?”

The skirt was short, truly, and her legs did seem to go on forever, clad in knee-high socks and ending in a pair of boots with heels high enough to propose legislation. But that didn’t do it. Nor did the ponytails, no, nor did the smile on her face and the light in her eyes when he looked up at her guiltily after realising he was talking to her – magnificently unsupported – breasts. What did it was when he pushed the small bag across the table to her, apologizing for not having had the time to have them properly washed. “Oh my,” she had said, holding his gaze and his breath, “I was rather counting on your having that done. You see,” she smiled, “right now, I’m not wearing any.”

The first thing she said – were one to discount the extortions and exaltations of their day’s inaugural activity – was “I don’t want you to think I’m the kind of girl who does this sort of thing.”

The first thing he said was “I love you.”

She leaned in and kissed him, a hand moving down across his body to convey her intentions. Protestations escaped his mouth with all the conviction of a willing spirit. She took the matter into her own and resolved it satisfactorily.

When she left she allowed him to keep what she had came for, as a souvenir.

Instead, to make sure he called, she left behind her heart, and took his with her.

The days passed in a slow tour of blissfulness. His memories were filled to their brim, even as he wondered where all the time went. Hours away from her merely heightened his anticipation at seeing her again, and he had enough of her inside him to conjure her up at will, a feat which happened so unconsciously that she was, in many ways, always with him. And the hours turned into days turned into weeks.

The mutual friend, upon learning of the itemization of the pair, had called him out, with rather noticeable urgency, and demanded to speak with him, alone, in secret, and, please-this-is-very-important, she is not to know. They met in a cafe one sunny afternoon, the kind that she and Zacharriah would complain to each other about, for being too bright and too full of other people. After the initial small talk – a necessary prelude in discussions of a severe nature – the friend, as delicately as he could, broached the subject.

“Did she tell you…?” he prompted, hoping against hope that she had, and the responsibility was out of his hands.

Zacharriah was not insensitive, at least not as obtusely as most of his gender; a lifetime of being in the background had taught him well in reading those who were not. “Oh that. Yes,” he nodded, attempting as best he could to set his friend at ease.

One did not need Zacharriah’s refined observation to notice the relief immediately flooding through his companion.

“I really fail to see what the big deal is, after all,” Zacharriah continued, in the non-committal tone of voice indicating that one could change the subject if one was uncomfortable.

“You don’t?” the friend paused, “what do you think I was talking about?”

“About you and her? I understand you could be worried about our friendship, but it doesn’t bother me and I hope the same would hold true for you.”

“That? Oh no, that was a long time ago. It wasn’t even anything serious. No, not that.”

“Then I admit I cannot comprehend what could be of such import.” His time with her, though brief, had equipped him with a measure of her haughtiness, though none of her inferiority – fortunate in the instance of latter, since he was well equipped with much of his own.

“You haven’t found out, have you?”

“Well, she did tell me about the time she…?”

“No, not that.”

“When she…?”

“No, not that.”

“Then her other affairs,” Zacharriah shrugged, waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. “Numerous as they were, it doesn’t matter who had her. I have her now.” He smiled as he quoted the credo she had wisely offered, adding, of his own, “one would surely not expect someone like her to be alone.”

“No. No, nothing to do with what she did when or with whom. I’m not even sure she would have told you, nothing personal, I don’t think she would have told anyone…” he hesitated.

The silence stretched out, with much swallowing and licking of lips. Zacharriah, to spare his friend the embarrassment of his discomfiture, broke eye-contact and looked about at the passing crowd.

The friend plunged headlong into traffic. “You see, she’s a–”

Zacharriah noticed a girl, standing out of the faceless crowd by the sorry distinction of being handicapped, lacking in one of the primary senses – taste. He heard the barbed comment she would have delivered, dripping with the pitying cruelty only the mercilessly thin can muster for the insufferably fat. In his head, he replied to her in the girl’s defense; who was, after all, only a shade too intimately acquainted with the calories, and not even uncommonly so; he could not defend her choice of clothes, for he could not excuse it, even to himself. He turned back to see his friend looking at him, all wide-eyed and obviously awaiting a response.

He briefly tried to remember the thread of their conversation, failed, and inserted the first panacean reply that he thought of. “Really?” he ventured.

“Yes!”

Zacharriah nodded sagaciously, attempting to look interested and awaiting further prompting.

“It doesn’t affect you…?”

Zacharriah wondered if it should. “Why should it?” he asked.

“Oh good,” the friend smiled the happy smile of a duty discharged.

Zacharriah was glad for the opening, since it would spare him getting caught in the cardinal impoliteness of not having been listening. “I’m thinking of getting a new car,” he said, “which model would you recommend?”

Zacharriah never thought again about that conversation, and left it only with a firm conviction in the marvels of German engineering.

The friend passed away in an accident on a dark, wet night a week later, stopping, as it were, a speeding truck. Though what remained could barely fill the closed casket, the medical experts concur that he would have felt little pain, if any at all.

Zacharriah was sombre at the wake, and made a solemn promise to himself to buy a German car in his friend’s honour. At his side, their hands clasped, she remained composed, and wept only later, when they were alone, after she had remarked to him that the rain that had contributed so to the tragedy was a freak, she had checked the weather that very day.

The sudden and untimely demise of the cause of their meeting effected that meeting’s final seal. Either of them, he realised in epiphanic clarity, as he held her fragile, sobbing form, could very well be gone upon the morrow. If it were she, why, he would kill himself and be done with, rather than go on in the shadow of a life that had passed for his existence before her light had entered and duly claimed it. But if it were he, what then? She would be all alone in this big, big world, and surely he did not expect, nor did he want, her to depart this plane prematurely, no. Far better that she would find someone else to take care of her, to be enlivened by her. But until then, he had to make what arrangements he could to safeguard her financial future. He had been selfish to live the way he had, without a minimum of regard for the unpredictability of life. If it had been him on that dark road, his worldly possessions would not have passed on to the singular person deserving of them.

He proposed. She accepted willingly.

They announced their engagement after the customary period of mourning.

And thusly, from the moment of their first meeting, through the time they were driven away from the chapel in a new vehicle of German manufacture, to, in fact, the end of his life, Zacharriah did not know what it was that he had fallen in love with.