Adolf Hitler did particularly poorly at parties.

I met the woman entirely by chance...but of course, this is how people meet, without exception, when they have no friends to facilitate such introductions. Granted, I did have friends, but it must be very difficult to go through life having no such introductions, unless you learn very early to be immensely outgoing. Adolf Hitler reminds us of the extreme consequences of what can occasionally happen when one is subjected to life under such circumstances, yet all the while cursed with awkward paranoiacal and antisocial dinner skills.

She was the one without any friends.

Deeply, I always suspected that that was because of some flaw on her part, until I grew to realize that she had no gross perceivable faults, such that I could see. In spite of the fact that she sat with her back turned, never speaking, if I ever ate meat in her presence, I found Elva to be a wholly charming person, especially because of the way she scared the elderly.

I saw her at least once a week; every Friday, after I got up sometime before dinner, I'd make a point of traveling to the corner store in order to purchase some quantity of Pop Rocks. In my own defense, no, I never actually ate them, but once I went made it to the park I took great amusement in the way the pigeons did. Elva would be there -- I did not know her name was Elva then -- walking her pet ferret (and there are no finer creatures than ferrets, the author must add) and smoking two cigarettes simultaneously. I knew the ferret's name long before I ever knew hers, since that was the name with which she listed her number in the phone book.

We always spent some time sitting on the same bench, but even to this day I am not sure which of us was sitting there in the hopes the other would sit there too.

One day a pigeon I had been working with for about a month died practically at my feet. I knew it so particularly well because, in that time it happened to have grown immensely fat. The pigeon (which I never named, in light of it seemingly being so unpopular with the other pigeons) didn't actually explode, but then they strangely never do in love stories. From the moment of its untimely passing onward, I was sure of the fact that I definitely didn't hate the person beside me, because she took the time out to laugh. At that, our eyes met, we both immediately turned away shyly (as was proper in those days), and I didn't see her at all the next week.

When she eventually came back to our park again, her hair was an entirely different shade of green.

The first words she ever spoke to me were mostly involved with bumming a cigarette. I didn't smoke, but maintained a pack in clear view, always, just in case she ever thought to ask. I of course graciously gave her as many as she could smoke, on the promise that she did it on the spot, and to my delight she took them all. It was a dreadful bother carrying them around, and the subsequent smoke rings she blew fired my dreams for days. Eventually Elva and I established something of a rapport, up until the day she taught me how to stare at elderly couples until they felt the need to find a different seat or indeed begin running. That was the night she kissed me. Right on the cheek. Sometimes, if I'm somewhere appropriately public, I'll dab it with just a bit of my own saliva, just to remember what it felt like. Afterwards, she screamed an impressive vocabulary of obscenities at me, and I found myself stabbed repeatedly with a collapsible dagger loaded with some amount of stage blood. Since we then had the entire park suddenly to ourselves, that was also the night I bought her ice cream, a gesture by which she was too flattered to admit she was severely lactose intolerant.

One night someone claiming to be her boyfriend called, and asked if Elva (since she and I had not yet exchanged names, it took her boyfriend several moments to satisfactorily describe her) were with me. I had no idea where she was, but an hour later she timidly peeked out from behind my shower curtain. At the time I was so preoccupied with the need to pull up my pants that I entirely did not remember to ask how, exactly, either she or her boyfriend had gotten my number.

I found out the next morning that her favourite breakfast cereal was pink, and I spent that afternoon in a grocery store attempting to find the actual brand. You know, initially as part of a half-baked plot to steal her away from whoever her boyfriend was, but eventually I resigned myself to doing it purely for the exercise. I found Elva in the park on the way home, however, and she ate handfuls of the cereal while she followed me back to my apartment. She talked about her ferret, which was actually her boyfriend's, and had apparently much more to do with his calls, since she'd forgotten to return it when she decided to hide from him, than any particular sense of, oh, jealousy on his part. She forgot to go home that night, and I forgot to remind her.

After that, we occasionally had sex, but only because we each admired the other's hair.

I think eventually she became less of a novelty to me. At least, the point came where I stopped asking her to (please) refrain from eating the food out of my refrigerator, and in fact I began having her over for dinner several nights each week. Of course, then afterwards there was still the sex. Elva's boyfriend soon left her for a waitress she herself had once slept with, and I comforted her as best I could as she cried and cried for the loss of the pet ferret.
It seemed natural, now that I allowed her to eat my food and bring me to orgasm, that I should ask Elva to move into my apartment. She agreed, but insisted upon sleeping in the other bedroom until we got to know each other better. It was high in the summer now, and we spent even more time in the park, flirting like schoolchildren with discussions of the terrible things we would do to; the world, innocent pets, property values, and human lives, if either of us should ever find out we had only months to live.

We never walked or bused anywhere if it could be helped (her parents lived in the east end of town, and so of course we seldom visited), since Elva was of the long-standing theory that skipping was the fastest and most efficient means of pedestrian travel. We gathered empirical data to prove this hypothesis as we skipped to, and visited one of a number of downtown shops, and therein experimented with a different kind of candy every night.

It was each and every quirk in her personality, occasionally unfolding like a new petal in some blackened sort of flower, that so enticed me into sticking around. It was a month, due to some sense of smug politeness on her part, before I found out she didn't like meat. Even now, sometimes she avoids the things I cook, claiming, in her own defense, to be on some hunger strike. She of course never says, exactly, where all the chocolate chips keep disappearing to, but then I never ask.

I was immensely flattered when she adopted my hair colour as her own. Oh, she would have eventually changed it anyway, she said; her eyes were flattered far more by purple, but she had to stop wearing her own clothes in favour of mine since they matched so poorly with her new look.

The night she vowed to kill me in various ways if I ever so much as changed the colour of my hair to one occurring in nature, moved into a suburb, or drove a car to the corner store, I cradled my head in her lap and revealed to Elva that I loved her.

The two of us had to move into a new apartment. In time we both grew tired of the amount of light mine would allow in. It was only a matter of time before finding something big, airy, and dark enough, with just enough rafters for drama. It had like three grossly anemic little windows, which we sealed forever with masking tape and tin foil, relying on our dimmer, cruder means, to see in the otherwise pitch black home we had made for ourselves.

We never talk about marriage -- it's just too Christian. Elva and I suspect one or both of us might be infertile, which is perfectly convenient, since neither of us actually like children, unless for some reason we felt the need to house a legion of plague rats, and feed them something warm and fleshy. Neither of us are nearly twenty-five yet, and we're still debating whether or not thirty is the ideal age for suicide. I suspect, being lazy at heart, we'll leave the subject on the floor where it is until forty.

I guess, as sort of an epilogue, I might as well say that old people never really come near us anymore. Neither do pigeons.

My friends think the world of Elva, though occasionally we take turns shunning them, just because we've worked long and hard to discover the means to turn this into a device working solely to have ourselves owed beer. We might sometimes seem decadent, but in reality we almost never eat Kraft Dinner. It's just too cheesy, in our opinion, and so infrequently is it that Elva and I achieve such consensus without long debate, we've frankly given this tenet our everything. It's just another creative outlet, of which we make a point of finding three a month, never rigidly. Her art could best be described as gray, but it's good for so many other reasons, too.

The ferret was called Stalin.

Furthermore, I believe, Paul was the walrus. And Hitler had only one testicle, you know.