When Prince Young Junior finally decided to get married at 57, his mother was happy. She called up all her friends and family to announce the happy news, and everybody was as excited as she was that Prince was finally getting hitched and his mother, who was 81, would finally be able to retire from running the household.
She did not think it was strange that she had never met the lucky bride as her son had always been very secretive about his love life. His father Prince Senior had been a very dominant man, and the "poor boy" - as she referred to him - had suffered a lot. As a matter of fact, he had suffered so much that it was fully understandable that his mother was the one who, to this very day, still ordered his clothes and shoes. Therefore, it was not really surprising that Arthur looked like a man in his eighties - but so far, he had never minded that detail as he could save a lot of time that way, and he knew how much his mother loved clothes! He had also never minded all the dates she had set him up on with various nice ladies from the nearby villages and the newspaper clippings of ladies looking for a companion, which she had put on the kitchen table every Sunday afternoon.
What his mother couldn't understand was that Prince was rather reluctant to have her and the rest of his family at his wedding. He even said he would have liked to elope! Now that would have broken his mother's heart because she had always said she wanted to live long enough to be at his wedding.
When the wedding day came, the lucky bride seemed to be late. Prince had arrived with a male friend from work, and his mother had arrived with half of the neighbourhood at the little town hall. They waited for the bride for close to ninety minutes. Prince's strange friend from work, who was probably serving as his best man, seemed to be really embarrassed and avoided to make eye contact with anybody, but he endeared himself to Prince's mother because he was dressed really smartly. The only thing she disliked were the pink tie he was wearing to his grey suit.
After ninety minutes had passed, the official came over and asked Prince whether he still wanted to go through with the wedding.
At that point, his friend from work got up and told the official: "No, I AM NOT going to go through with this!"
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120 Blind Dates... And Other Short Stories
General FictionThe first short story in this collection was written exclusively for the Chicklit contest "120 Dates" in November 2020. The collection has been growing ever since.
