Falling in Love with an Ice Cream Man Is About More than a Big Cone

Welcome to Stranger Than Flicktion, our new Flickr-inspired column. We provide writers with five random food-related Flickr images and ask them to construct a fictional short story in under five days. In this edition, we explore the intertwine of passion and frozen desserts.

My lifelong addiction to the teeth-shatteringly sweet, frozen churned mixture of cream, milk, sugar, and eggs started during my childhood in foggy London. In kindergarten, when I would visit my grandmother after school, we would sit in her floral-wallpapered dining room and savor bowls of ice milk with Mocha Mix creamer poured over thick dollops of hot fudge.

From my earliest school years onward, I never cared about popularity or being one of the cool kids. Instead, I became a sly and stealthy hunter, choosing my pals based on the potential ice-cream-eating I might encounter in their homes. In fourth grade, I honed an uncanny sixth sense for the arrival of the ice cream truck. While playing tag in the streets, my ears would suddenly perk up and the hoodlums I hung out with would lay bets on my predictions of its whereabouts. I would be first in line with coins pilfered from my mother's purse for tall malts packed into a cardboard cup with a long plastic spoon to reach the soupy, melted innards at the bottom.

In junior high, I chose my best friend Mylie because I knew her mother always had a carton of butter pecan in the freezer which we would sneak out of the house with to lie naked in the backyard for suntans thus affixing an air of debauchery to my sweet tooth for life. On summer vacation to a beachside park, I befriended a blonde stoner girl named Cheryl whose obese grandfather sat permanently stuffed into the upholstered seat at a wooden kitchen table in his RV. Over tubs of cheap, fluorescent mint chip I would tolerate his World War II tales and he would abide my perpetual slurping of his favorite dessert. In high school, I ditched fifth period daily to sneak off campus to the adjacent diner for strawberry milkshakes, and in college I had an affair with a purple-haired punk rocker named Roz because she admitted to living on a blueberry-cheesecake cone diet.

So it is no surprise that I found the love of my life inside an ice cream truck that graced the bridge one dark night. As rain streamed down on asphalt, causing a hot sulfur steam to rise, he handed me the biggest dark chocolate cone of my dreams. I blushed while thinking about what they say about the size of a man's cone as my toes curled in my boots.

I fell hard when he told me the key around his neck belonged to his very first ice cream truck, which now proudly resided in the Boneyard of Retired Ice Cream Trucks as one of the more pristine. He asked me to go home with him to play Pop Pop, a game much like the food sex scene in 9½ Weeks but using only scoops of pink bubble-gum ice cream to eat, blow up, and pop on each other's goose-pimpled skin while rolling around in the mud.

Before long, we moved in together and started melding into one unit. Our meals were a parade of flavors, from Neapolitan to pistachio to cherry-vanilla to salted caramel.

Like most couples do, we began collecting idiosyncrasies as a two—like our propensity to mutually analyze our poo by comparing said bowel movements in ice cream metaphors.

"Today, I released a perfect light mocha soft-serve into the bowl," I would say on a bright Monday morning after a night spent eating sundaes topped with puffed cinnamon rice.

"Exquisite Fudgsicle bricks," he would brag after foie gelato at a local gastropub.

"Oooh, cappuccino nuggets in globes of dark chocolate," I would delight, waking up late after an evening spent savoring vanilla and bacon-bit cones at a fair.

When he asked me to marry him, I felt my dreams had come true. He popped the question with a candy pacifier ring and a mixed tape of carnival tunes over a plate of Bananas Foster.

The people in my life were less than supportive.

"What well-adjusted man on this planet CHOOSES to become an ice cream man?" screamed Mylie.

"Don't you know that ice cream men are all pedophiles?" Cheryl whispered harshly.

"Oh please, this is the city of Jack the Ripper," I retorted to Roz's chagrin. "You think I am going to be scared of a sweet ol' man whose worst traits are collecting wicked clown paraphernalia and enjoying an occasional orange pineapple Big Stick up the bum?"

"ONE WORD", my mother drunk-Facebooked one night on my public wall after my relationship status changed to "Married": "DIABETES."

But I knew they were merely jealous that I had lived one long trajectory of a pure life, one in which I knew from day one what I liked and wanted most, which was more than I could say for most people. I was not going to shirk my passion for my husband, or our obsession with ice cream, or any of the quirks we had come to call our own simply because I no longer (and never really had) fit in with my friends, family and society. I knew deep in my heart that understanding the self was the vital ingredient to happiness and that I was a lucky lady to have found my Mr. Goodcone.

Besides, it wasn't always rainbow sprinkles. In the winters, we starved.

Read more stories from Stranger Than Flicktion:

A Wine-Fueled Key Party Didn't Save My Marriage

I Drowned My Love in Gravy

Why My Brother and I Eat Toothpaste Cake for Good Luck