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34MAG | 34THPARALLEL.NET

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34MAG | 34THPARALLEL.NET
34MAG | 34THPARALLEL.NET
Blink, blink: I love you. Blinkity-blink: I am your Sweetheart.

Blink, blink: I love you. Blinkity-blink: I am your Sweetheart.

Aug 01, 2007
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34MAG | 34THPARALLEL.NET
34MAG | 34THPARALLEL.NET
Blink, blink: I love you. Blinkity-blink: I am your Sweetheart.
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The stories she had been taught by Barbies and grandmas warned that princes and Good Men only bothered rescuing nice, virtuous girls.

GOOD GIRLS BY ALICE SHIN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 01

He wanted a nice girl. A girl with a sweet heart. A girl he could call Sweetheart. Someone to call his own. He searched high and low for them, those Southern belles and Midwestern good girls he had read about in those thrift store 99-cent paperbacks. Each one was so pretty on the page, another honey-dipped heart filled with goodness creaming over and crying out for a good man to love her right. But when he stopped through a few cities in Kansas, he couldn’t find any of those Good Girls and instead only found Girls Looking for a Good Time.

A friendly hand slithered into his pants. “Get off me, you harlot!” he shouted.

The girl didn’t take too kindly to that and threw some peanuts in his face. She would have thrown her drink, too, if it hadn’t been so deliciously full of rum and artificially flavored syrups.

“Fuck you freak!” she said, careful not to spill a drip of her drink. And she left, leaving behind a man dressed in little bits of peanut shell and peanut skin; love’s pauper.

His luck wasn’t much better in Georgia, since most of the girls he’d found were dressed like they were from New York City. He tried looking around public parks to find a lone girl idly reading a novel, stretched out in the sun, or one of them drinking a paper cup of tea while staring out a window of dreams.

Most of them were actually in the company of another person or cell phone, their mouths so busy forming words that their eyes had no chance of recognizing him as the man of their dreams. That tall, dark- haired and handsome type, who didn’t say much because there wasn’t much left to be said, because everything and anything that needed to be said would be spoken solely in his gaze. In fact, when he did find that Good Girl, that Southern belle, that Sweetheart, neither of their lips would even pucker and purse and form the words, “I do” at their wedding because they would be so incredibly in love that their very eyes would need only blink to telegraph their consent.

Blink, blink: I love you. Blinkity-blink: I am your Sweetheart.

But no such girl resided in Kansas or Georgia. So he bought his third and last plane ticket and headed out for California. He had heard that the girls of Hollywood liked to party all the time. Surely, he could find one that was tired of the noise, the lights—and was looking for that Good Man.

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