The Candy Ion

It was a Biblical mote that caused a negative electrical charge via the optic fuse -- becoming the increasingly searing pain of the mysterious iritis disease, a disease intermittently besetting Desmond's eyes since he was a young man in the early 1970s, till treated, each time, with special steroid drops. Without such treatment, an inner-beam of agonising blindness would parthenogenetically ensue.

Desmond's wife -- for whom he had a choice of affectionate epithets amid the general condition of marriage that, at its optimum, provided a powerfully mutual I.O.U. -- oscillated, like most wives, between pity and scorn. After all these years she no longer claimed to be his youthful 'eye candy' but she nevertheless retained a seasoned charm: a bespoke spell that could elicit a miracle cure from the least likely of sources... A kickstart from despair. A remedial, if rogue, ricochet from the interface of negative and positive.

Desmond had long surrendered any chance of ever ridding himself of chronic iritis, but he suddenly wondered if crying with the right sort of tears might cleanse for good the organic roots within the optic labyrinth, just as syringing by a nurse could spirit away earwax in a different bodily organ. And a wife, if nobody else, had the power, he thought, to synergise her twin natures as nurse and aggravant with electrically emotional charges at each end of the marital spectrum induced at the precise magical moment of serendipitous catalysing.

But those charges had to be sincerely experienced, by both of them as inducer and recipient. He had to stir the mixed feelings that marriage often made into the most powerful of palliatives. He had to ignite the greatest sweetness within the greatest rancour by means of the greatest skilfully synchronised co-incidence.

He stared at his wife and uttered the most annoying of husbandly nonsenses with the most disarming charm. And the consequent tussle of mutual accusation and forgiveness brought irrigating tears of both laughter and sadness to their eyes as syphoned by the accompanying contrast of deep sincerity and alter-cation, resulting in the greatest surge of emotion that had ever been induced by the iconic magic of marriage.

"Thanks, sugar," Desmond softly said, as his iritic orbs were assuaged by the delicately balanced sight of the spirit summoned between them. But do Biblical miracles ever really take hold? Through a veil of tears, each face faced the other face with a sense of seasoned love coupled with a paradoxical pang of both certainty and misplaced hope. For ever or never, amen. Ion or Eon.