Darryl pulled his new truck into an empty lot and cut the engine. The studio had directed him back to Los Angeles for a meeting with the celebrated female director scheduled to helm an adaptation of a young adult novel about vampires in an urban high school. The shiny red Dodge Ram took the place of the old Toyota Tundra that disappeared the same day he'd been drugged. The police had never located his truck and Darryl chose not to implicate the notorious Craig, who was most likely responsible for the entire situation. He would rather eat the cost, Darryl reasoned, than take a chance that the details of his experience might reach his father's ears via his law enforcement friends.
The experience turned out to be an expensive weekend all around. Darryl had ended up footing the entire cost for the petition for annulment. One thousand dollars. Money well spent, he reasoned, even though seventeen days had passed since he and Iris signed and filed the petition for annulment of their drug-induced marriage and no word yet. Still, any day now their petition would be granted and he and Iris could go their separate ways, never to lay eyes on one another again.
Those first few days, Darryl called Iris regularly to check. His question was always the same. 'Any news on the annulment?'. After a few days of that, Iris not-so-politely told Darryl not to call again. She would contact him when the papers arrived. If his number showed up again on her caller ID, Iris threatened, she would block his calls. Then Darryl would have to wait until he was back home to see if and when his copy of the papers arrived.
Darryl's smartphone pinged. He knew it wasn't Iris. He had programmed her number with a special ringtone. No, he thought, it was probably the director's assistant with more location requests. While they were filming, it was not uncommon to have last minute requests for locations to replace the ones that didn't quite work out or were needed for changes in the director's vision of the film.
The red numeric counter beside his email icon indicated that two emails had just arrived. Darryl tapped lightly on the screen, a bit taken aback to see that the sender of both email messages was listed as Iris Gilford. He stared at the screen uncertainly. He was reluctant to open the messages; each included an attachment. Darryl could not figure out why there would be two messages from Iris unless some type of problem had occurred with the annulment.
Denial of the annulment was a scenario he had not allowed himself to entertain over the past 17 days. When he had explained to the courthouse official that not only did he not remember getting married or even meeting his 'wife', the man hadn't even blinked. He merely reassured Darryl that theirs was a common occurrence. An annulment under those conditions would be a foregone conclusion.
The words eased the knot that had resided in Darryl's stomach since he found out he was legally bound to a woman unlike any he had ever encountered. He had chosen not to reveal to the official that while he might not remember the wedding ceremony he continued to have flashes of memories of the wedding night. He was always unclothed during these flashes, and a certain traitorous part of him was always buried deep in some part of Iris.
During their waiting period. Darryl often considered the irony of such a truth. He still could not recall, might never recall, a single detail of how he got dragged into the entire absurd situation. But wedding night memories came through as clear as 1080p high definition. Even now a particularly frequent flash attempted to hijack Darryl's thoughts. In the wee hours of his wedding night he had come to semi-wakefulness, rolled over and mounted his drowsing wife. There in the total darkness, filled with drugs and buried in the wet and warmth of her, Darryl had simply enjoyed the ages old dance of male and female. He had never felt a sexual encounter so right. Why then, he wondered, was it virtually impossible in the harsh light of day to even consider a repeat encounter between them? Maybe, a little voice reminded him, because she looks like a man in drag.
Darryl cleared his uncharitable thoughts. He squared his shoulders and forced his attention back to Iris' emails. He opened the first one. A crystal clear scan of the annulment decree slowly coalesced into view. Darryl used his thumb and forefinger to zoom in on the part of the document that proclaimed his marriage to Iris null and void.
He lost track of how long he stared at the electronic image. The strangest chapter of his life had come to a close. Perhaps years from now, when he was an old man, his unremembered wedding (minus certain details) would be the story his grandchildren were tired of hearing. But for now, the unplanned adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Darryl Pine would remain a deeply buried secret.
When he opened Iris' second email, Darryl didn't know whether to be insulted or laugh aloud. Iris had sent him a photo of a canvas she'd drawn. It was a pencil sketch of him. His head was enormous, his body thin and wobbly. Iris had perfectly captured his features, down to the little cleft in his chin. The figure in the sketch was caught around the waist by a giant hook that jerked Darryl off the canvas to the left. The sketch was signed with Iris' signature and a small caption - 'Good Riddance, Skinny White Boy'.
It was fitting, Darryl thought, that he and Iris end their association as abrasively - and abruptly - as they'd begun it. She had made it clear from the beginning that their common predicament would not generate tender words or actions between them. And that was fine with him. The sooner they severed any connection between them, the sooner they could each resume their lives.
