of nurture’s wildness: a novella (book 3, ch. 2)

by Tom Stuckey

2

The problem was not that Ted could not find women. He could. It was that he could not find any that he truly liked. Dating apps were a constant source of unlikely matches, some of which led to sex and a lot that did not, but very few, if any, ended in companionship. His generation had been brought up in a swamp of idealistic love, religious love, political love - all mixed in with (and coming out of) advertisement’s gain. In the daytime, it was pop love, but nighttime was an incoherent mess that always fell short. Now the screens of the dating apps were filled with people—all looking for what they had been told to seek, sent out in droves to find it at all costs. You could see it in their lines: “Treat me like a princess”; “Agree and we’ll get on”; “The way to win me over is to make me laugh”; “Must be over 6’ to get on this ride.” Ted had nothing against them, stopping to look at the pictures with beautiful smiles and then reading the bios which read like long nights of bitterness that would find their ways to him if he let them. In short, Ted felt alienated.

Ted still fell into traps everywhere. They were mainly lain in the phone now, but also on the walls, in the books, and on the radio. They had become intrusive and clever, so clever (in fact) that Ted often found parcels at his door that he never remembered ordering. Arriving back at his apartment from work, he was surprised to find one waiting. It was a hadronizing water bottle and some herb that he could not pronounce from the hills of the Himalayas. So, after hadronizing some water and eating some black paste, which made him feel unwell in a new way, he got out his phone and hunted for the most likely match.

Jenny had agreed to meet him. She was sweet and seemed to be the most likely to be interested in similar things. They met at 9 o’clock at a cafe rouge the following night, that was lit up like a red beetle and the only thing to have survived the blast in the summer dusk.

“Hi,” Jenny looked more nervous than Ted, stumbling on the rest of her sentence and avoiding eye contact. “You ok?” Ted had noticed that women often would ask if he was OK, and it seemed to him that he either appeared not OK and he was not aware or that they were not OK, and the only way they knew how to handle not being OK was to ask him.

“Yes, I’m OK. It’s a pleasant evening tonight.”

“It’s surreal. I still can’t get used to this way of meeting people.” Jenny smiled and looked less stressed now; she had released some on him.

The rest of the meal was routine: the food came, they ate, they asked about each other, neither seemed to listen. The connection was a frayed nerve that was unable to reconnect to give feeling—this was until Jenny said something that was interesting, and Ted could feel it immediately changing the direction of his life.

“I read in the paper today that there is a position opening in a lighthouse in the middle of the Atlantic, and that the salary is a million pounds for one year, but no one is taking the job because of the brutal nature of the role.” Ted obviously perked up and encouraged her to go on. “The light obviously has to be maintained, but there is a consistent barrage of storms that attack it. Not to mention the loneliness. There is no internet and only a radio for communication. Not surprising they can't fill the job. Who would do such a thing?”

The rest of the date came and went; he would not see Jenny again, and he wondered briefly who she might find to survive it all with. He got home, chucked the remains of the black paste into the bin, laid back on the couch, and took a few pulls on his vape, letting out the breath that mixed with the lamp at his side. Taking out his phone, he found the article on the lighthouse job, clicked on the link, and began to read though the application; it was long, but he thought it would be worth giving it a go.

It would be a change from dating apps.    

*Read Tom Stuckey’s next installment of Of Nurture’s Wildness (Book III) on September 16, 2025, at 6PM CST.

Photo of Tom Stuckey

BIO: Tom is a writer from Devon in England.  His work can be found at A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Bristol Noir, Nut House Press, and Pulp Magazine. He is the author of The Canary in the Dream is Dead and The Sun Marches upon Us All. Learn more about Tom Stuckey at www.tomstuckey.com.