1589. Manageable portions

I’m sorely tempted to write about something horrible – just for a change. Yet, as a theatre reviewer once said of one of my plays, “There’s enough trouble in the world already without this play.” I shall therefore avoid the temptation to indulge in horribility and keep to the usual niceties grounded in a tender reality. So here goes…

When Anastasia murdered her husband she had little idea of the wonderful repercussions it would have. She had chopped him up into manageable portions, put each into a plastic bag, and stacked them in the freezer. Each week she put a bag of a piece of her husband out at the gate to be picked up by the trash collection truck. She had only the one plastic bag left. She had overlooked it because it had been covered (in the freezer next to the chicken drumsticks) with a flannel for the sake of modesty.

Anastasia had thought that last week’s trash collection had ended her saga of weeks of removal, and now, with the discovery of what lay hidden beneath the flannel there was yet another week to go. But that is not what matters. What matters is what else she saw. Beneath the flannel-covered remains there was a key. She knew instantaneously what the key unlocked.

For weeks she had searched the house for the key to the safe. How it fallen into the freezer was anyone’s guess. Immediately she went and unlocked the safe. There was nothing inside but a piece of paper and a bank card. On the paper was written a pin number. Anastasia dashed straight down the street and inserted the card into the bank’s hole-in-the-wall ATM. What a discovery! What a huge amount of money! What a fortune! Anastasia did a little dance in the street there and then.

By now the once-flannel-covered portion of husband, which she had inadvertently been holding when she dashed out of the house, was starting to defrost. A kindly neighbour saw it and asked, “Anastasia! What on earth is that you’re holding?”

“Oh!” said Anastasia, “it’s a leg of mutton for my dinner. Perhaps you’d like to come for dinner and we’ll share it.”

Of course, the neighbour came to dinner. And of course, of course, Anastasia put the trash out at the gate to be picked up early next morning, before serving her guest chicken drumsticks.