2586. Putting up the Christmas tree

Darling, do you want the Christmas tree over in front of the window?

We had it in front of the window last year. What about over there in that corner?

We’d have to move the sofa.

We can always move the sofa back. Just give it a push. No, it doesn’t look right. Move the sofa back. What about that corner over there?

There’s no electric plug for the Christmas tree lights. I suppose we could do without lights this year. A change is as good as a holiday.

No Christmas tree lights! Goodness me. You’re so negative. Why are you so negative about things? I make a suggestion and you run me down. I only suggested we put the tree over there and you attack me.

I didn’t attack you. I just said there was no way to run a cable for the lights.

You said you didn’t want lights on the tree. We can’t have a tree without lights.

I never said that. I said there was no electricity outlet.

I’ve a better idea.  Why don’t we change the whole room around just for Christmas? Put the dining table and chairs over there. Move the sofa and armchairs here, with the television against that wall, and then the Christmas tree can go where the dining table was. Just move them, dear, and we’ll see.

Phew! That was a lot of hefty stuff!

No. It doesn’t feel right. Put the things back, dear. What say we put the tree in front of the window like last year? It looked good. I don’t know why you wanted to change it.

2174. Death by drowning

The coroner said it was death by drowning. Things hadn’t been going too well for Janelle and Melville. They had been living together for fourteen years in a rather nice villa in the south of France. It had a swimming pool for summer and a sauna for the cold. Around about the eleventh year of their relationship they began to argue big time. They had often argued, but not at the level the eleventh year ushered in.

Janelle wanted to heat the pool. “How lovely to take a dip in the winter.” They could well afford it. But Melville thought it nice to do seasonal things in a seasonal time. “Why swim in the winter?”

The argument had intensified over three years. It was now winter, and Janelle was harping, harping, harping.

“Ok,” said Melville, “if it’s a winter swim you want it’s a winter swim you’ll get.”

2128. A domestic battle

Mr and Mrs Bishop would frequently be heard by all the neighbours when they were having an argument. Mrs Bishop was the more vociferous of the two, and her strident voice carried the swear words a considerable distance. Mr Bishop was more mousey. He appeared to be a lot more timid, and would often mumble his response.

“I wish to goodness he’d take a few lessons in voice projection,” joked neighbour Molly Bendale. “Sometimes it is impossible to pick up what he’s saying.”

Even though they argued repeatedly, it was still a great shock to all the neighbours when Mr Bishop died suddenly in his kitchen one Sunday morning. A great silence hung over the street for a while, more from lack of arguing than from grief. And yet, Mrs Bishop was eventually noisy enough in her distress. Perhaps it was shock; perhaps it was sorrow.

“I don’t know how she’s going to fill in her time from now on,” joked neighbour Molly Bendale, “now that her nemesis has gone. Still I suppose they loved each other in a way.”

Loved each other indeed! At the trial, the Bishop’s kitchen frying pan was the main piece of evidence.

1990. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Humphrey sat and pondered. He wrote a blog; frequent stories and things. It was time perhaps for a good old-fashioned murder.

Humphrey had devised many a murder over the years. He had poisoned and stabbed, shot with pistol and rifle, organized fatal accidents. There had been drownings and sunstrokes and coronaries. If Humphrey concocted a storybook death, even from natural causes, it could be construed as murder. He didn’t have to kill characters off. But snuff characters out he did, and often with glee.

The only problem was that things were becoming run-of-the-mill; so humdrum; rather ho-hum. Are there any original ways left to murder? Is there still such a things as a creative homicide?

In the meantime, Humphrey was on another mission. Occasionally his stories degenerated into Science Fiction. Today he was in a space craft – a mother ship that was headed for the moon. When they got there, Nancy would land on the surface of the moon in the special moon lander. She would be the first woman to walk on the moon.

“It’s very important,” said Nancy.

“I don’t think it’s important at all,” said Humphrey. “Science is science.”

They had a big argument, but agreed to a semi-placid relationship while their scientific experiments were carried out. Nancy went off on her little moon lander and history was made! Wonderful! The first woman in history to set foot on non-Earth soil!

“I shall do my best to make her name forever remembered,” thought Humphrey. He turned the mother ship towards home and took off.

Ha! Ha! Ha!

1959. A finger in every pie

Wendy and Ronald didn’t eat out that often. Now and again they might go to a fast-food chain and get something. Not to take home, but to simply have there and then on one of the outside, bird-crapped tables. But still, an outing is an outing. It’s a change of scene if not exactly dining at the Ritz.

They normally liked to eat healthy. They were not fuss-pots about food but I suppose they could be called “careful eaters”. Healthy eating meant that going to get an unhealthy meat pie or an unhealthy hamburger and French fries once in a while was an absolute treat!

It was while Ronald was tucking onto his kangaroo and double egg burger that he came across a finger; a human finger. Although he wasn’t sure because he had already bitten into it and therefore pulled the finger out of his mouth, he was ninety percent sure that the finger had been stuck in the kangaroo meat rissole.

“Look what I found in my hamburger!” exclaimed Ronald to Wendy. “Someone’s index finger!”

“It’s not an index finger,” said Wendy. “I think it’s a middle finger.”

“How would you know that?” said Ronald. “They’re both very much the same.”

A wee argument ensued, with both Wendy and Robert sticking to their guns; although Wendy reckoned it was from a right hand and Ronald from a left. In the end they were able to laugh about it.

“It’s an unresolved mystery,” said Ronald as he scrapped his leftover meal with the uneaten finger into the waste bin. “I guess it’s something we will never solve.”

Which just goes to show, if a moral is to be taken from this episode, that wee matrimonial disagreements can sometimes be solved with a little laughter.

1916. Why don’t you suck eggs?

I paid good money to a tree doctor to have the dead tree cut down and taken away that was disfiguring my garden lawn. And what happened? The idiot cut down the wrong tree. He’s not going to get paid.

“You’re not getting paid,” I told him. “You’ve cut down the wrong tree.”

“You’ll pay me or else,” he said. “I cut down the tree you pointed out.”

“You’re not getting paid, and that’s that,” I said.

“Lady, why don’t you suck eggs?”

Well, that settled that. I’m not going to have a bigoted lumberjack cut down my wrong tree and tell me to suck eggs. Who does he think he is? Does he think he’s Lord Muck of Egypt or what? He can put his chainsaw in his pipe and smoke it.

All that was seven years ago. I still can’t mow my lawn. Sometimes I wish I’d never married him.

1915. How to pick up guys

Bridgette was having none of it. This was the third time she had told her new boyfriend that she didn’t take sugar in her coffee and the third time he’d sugared it. Didn’t he listen?

He said it was no big deal. When he moved in he said he wanted to sleep on the side of the bed nearest the door – “Because guys end up going to the bathroom in the night more often” – but did she listen? No. She was in the bed and nearest the door before he could undo his shirt buttons.

Anyway, said Bridgette, it really annoyed her the way he drove the car – and it was her car. He drove along glancing at the rear vision mirror like it was an obsession. Glance glance glance. He said he was looking out for cops. There might be a cop following. So Bridgette asked what have you got to hide from cops? And he said the only thing hidden around here is your brains. He meant it as a joke, but Bridgette flung her sugared coffee (by now it was thankfully cold) all over her new boyfriend and he said things that shall go here unrecorded.

Everything grew into a momentous argument and Bridgette said she would show him around and said “I’ll start by showing you the door”. He told her to jump in the lake, he was going nowhere, but she was welcome to get in her car and go off to where he didn’t care. He repeated that he was going nowhere, and Bridgette said “It’s obvious you’re going nowhere and never will.”

Bridgette said she was sorry, and he said “Try telling that to someone who gives a shit.”

He’s gone now. Thankfully. Bridgette realized she had made a mistake with him initially. It was her fault for inviting him into her life in the first place. One day the right guy will come along. You never know from one minute to the next what exciting person Fate is going to throw in your path. Tonight she’s going down to the pub to see if Mister Right is in fact waiting just around the corner.

1834. Kitchen spat

“You just have to wonder sometimes where the time goes,” said Dolly to husband, Lyndon. “It’s nearly two weeks now since I started to repaint the kitchen cupboards in the evening and I’m not even half way through.”

“There are two reasons for that,” said Lyndon. “Number One, you’re too fussy; and number two, you talk too much.”

Without any forethought, Dolly picked up the can of paint and threw the contents all over her husband. It wasn’t planned. It was spontaneous. Dolly had had enough of his snide remarks. Lyndon was covered in green pain, as was the kitchen floor and oven.

Lyndon was now angry, and perhaps justifiably so. “You know what?” he said. “You know what? I wasn’t going to tell you until after your birthday, but you’ve blown the surprise. I’m off. I’ll take the car. You keep the house. You catch the bus to where ever the hell you want to go. I’ll rent somewhere.”

“Good riddance!” said Dolly, louder than before. “You’ve been a pain in the proverbial for months. Here I am trying to paint the kitchen cupboards to make the house nice, and you just stand around and criticize. Well I’ll be better on my own. You are the most…“

“Just hold it there,” said Lyndon.

“What?”

“The director said not to get too loud on that passage. It’s more threatening to almost whisper the lines.”

“Oh, that’s right,” said Dolly. “Shall we take it from the top?”

1622. A study in ennui

It certainly produces ennui when stuck inside on a rainy day. In fact, Syd had stayed in bed with the curtains drawn. The only thing that would happen if he got up would be to have breakfast before discovering that there was “nothing to do”. He wasn’t allowed much time on his phone, he wasn’t allowed much time watching videos, he wasn’t allowed much time on his computer, he wasn’t allowed much time doing sweet nothing. And now his parents were telling him to “go look for a summer job during the holiday time.” His parents sucked. The world sucked. It was hosing down outside. He might as well stay in bed. So he did.

When his father came home around one in the afternoon he went into Syd’s room and said “Get out of bed you lazy sod and do something useful.” Syd saw red and leapt out of bed and he and his father had a shouting match. Syd threw on some clothes and stormed out of the house.

What Syd’s father then said to Syd’s mother shouldn’t necessarily appear here unedited. But he swore that their next two sons would have their teenage years circumvented and they’d go from age eleven to twenty-two in one go. It’s a wonder the falling rain outside didn’t steam and hiss and evaporate once it hit the roof of the Maddock household. Syd’s father mowed the lawn in the rain he was so fed up to the back teeth. Then he tidied the garage. Then he fixed the broken cupboard door handle in the kitchen.

When dinner time came Syd came home and everything was normal.

1485. Ned’s old truck

Ned Grinter had an old truck. Some might call the old truck a pick-up and some might call it a ute. It was once white, and a bit battered. It was Ned’s pride and joy, although he didn’t use it much – mainly several times a year to gather firewood for the winter. The rest of the time he used his car. He would polish the truck’s tires, and even polish the black cover that stretched over the back of the truck. Some might call the back of the truck a deck and some might call it a tray.

Ned was out collecting firewood in the forest with his wife, Barbara. He was chucking the firewood haphazardly onto the back of the truck. He was doing mighty fine loading wood when Barbara suggested that if he packed the wood nicely he’d be able to fit more on.

He didn’t have time to pack things nicely. They could come back and get a second load. It was quicker not to be fussy.

Things developed into an argument and then Ned, firewood only half loaded, took off in his truck for back home. And when he got home he stretched the cover over the back of the truck and said, Stuff it; stuff the firewood; his wife could freeze through the winter for all he cared.

So Ned’s old truck stayed unused throughout the cold winter, parked behind the back of the garden shed. Come the end of winter and Ned needed to use his truck to pick up a beer fridge he’d bought online. He unloaded the firewood. But he didn’t have a clue what to do with his wife’s decomposing corpse.