Dr. Tanzler's Peculiar Love Story, Overheard

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Contributor: Alina Yudkevich

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“You will sail to Havana and you must never look back,” his mother told him on his last night in Rotterdam.

“I’m going to rip your tongue out, you ungrateful…” his father started to tell him, but died before he could make his final wishes known.

“You gotta fuck the pain away,” a blonde at the bullfight said to nobody in particular, and he married her later that year.

“SHORTAGE OF RADIOLOGISTS AT KEY WEST MARINE HOSPITAL,” the notice read, and he had always loved the beach bum lifestyle so he went to the corner store for two American passports, a musculoskeletal imaging guide, and some sunscreen.

“I wish to see you again,” he told the raven-haired apparition that began visiting him in the night after his wife died in labor. “You are so very beautiful.”

“Tuberculosis, it looks like,” the orderly told him. “She’s that cigar maker’s daughter. Sexy little firecracker.”

“It’s you,” he said, standing over her hospital bed.

“¿Cómo te llamas?” she asked.

“I will give you all the jewels and worldly pleasures,” he said to his love. “I will save you.”

“OUT!” yelled her parents. “She does not need an x-ray!”

“I did my best, mi princesita,” he wept as the nurse pulled the sheet over her face.

“An above-ground mausoleum? That’s gonna cost you, buddy,” said the tombstone salesman.

“It must be so cold in there,” he said to her ghost as she serenaded him with a slow Spanish melody. “I will save you.”

“The shovels are in aisle 7,” said the girl at the hardware store. “Not sure about the formaldehyde...”

“I’m piecing you back together, mi amor,” he said, gently weaving wire through brittle bones, rolling mismatched glass eyes between his fingers. “My little doll. Now you will be beautiful forever.”

“I heard the most awful rumor,” said a stenographer on her lunch break.

“I reckon I smelled some stench,” his neighbor said to the police, the morning his heart broke a second time.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, last I checked, being a hopeless romantic is not a crime,” his court-appointed lawyer said, the day before he was released on a technicality.


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Alina Yudkevich is a 17th grader at the University of Georgia, studying English and Film Studies and working part-time at a particle accelerator lab. She enjoys pugs, video editing, running, b-horror, and exploring the unknown via Google street view.
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