Venerable Wife Mini Story #3

She looks at me as I enter the room. Her gaze - a level below the emotional response of the average person — is wondering why I was in the kitchen for a whole hour, but she doesn't ask. She gives me time to tell it in my own way.

"There was an episode of Mr. Bean downstairs," I tell her. "What happened?" she asks. "There was a cat outside, right? And I went down to mix poison into tuna and give it to her so she'd fuck off, right? So I went down, found a can of tuna, and went into the storage room to look for rat poison. I found a dark spot, hard to reach, behind some shelves and boxes. Naturally I didn't bother moving things or clearing space, I just shoved my hand at a shelf full of poison and traps to grab whatever there was to grab. I saw a blue box, open, with a drawing of rats on it, and I remembered that was the packet I was looking for. I pushed my hand into the box, felt something soft, and pulled my hand back. The box came back stuck to my hand, my fingers covered in a peanut butter scented glue trap for cockroaches."

She looks at me. Hasn't moved an inch since I started the story. Face sealed, but I can see it's amusing her. So I keep going.

"I kept calm," I say. Here she nearly breaks. I see her choking a laugh through a cough.

"I washed my hands with soap and water for 10 minutes. Scrubbed it with the sponge, barely helped. Then I look at the poison and the tuna I left on the floor and not on the counter, so there wouldn't be poison on the counter. I'd gone down for that half an hour ago and still hadn't touched it."

I see her suppressing another laugh and deliberately ignore it.

"I remembered what I'd gone down for and wiped my hand, bits of paper still sticking to it. My hand is now a thumb welded to another finger and two crooked fingers" — and I show her what it looks like. "All I had to do was come up here and ask you what to do, but the ego wouldn't let me, so I stood there rubbing and did nothing. Anyway, I sat down on the floor and opened the tuna. The oil spilled onto my hand with the glue and..."

She can't contain it anymore and a small laugh escapes. It makes me stop the story for a second and maybe join her, but I decide the story is more important.

"So I took the tuna and the poison back to the counter and washed my hands again, off the oil and the paper and the cockroach glue. And I saw that on the wrapper of the glue it says: 'keep away from children,' and the drawing is of a giant stupid cockroach, stuck to a trap because he's a small stupid cockroach with no brain to know what a trap is, and I got stuck in the same trap. Three-minute job, TOPS! ...took me an hour. I have no idea when I went down there, it was still light outside."

Her body starts shaking under the blanket when she can't hold the laugh any longer looking at me. The sealed face opens, the eyes soften and she smiles, then laughs out loud with for about 7 seconds, which means I won.

I say to her: "Do you know how much I love you, from one to a hundred?"

"No."

"At least 97. Did you like not getting 100?"

"No, you gave the right answer. You need to leave some points to love yourself too."