They glanced at each other’s faces and luggage and in reverberative echoes cried:
“Where’re you going?”
“What’sthat?”
“My suitcase.”
“My valise.”
“My overnight case!”
“Do you realize this is the first time we’ve met in the middle of the street since Halloween twenty years ago?”
“Hell, this fs Halloween!”
“Yeah! For what? Trick or treat?”
“Let’s go see!”
And unerringly, with no chart, map, or menu, they turned with military abruptness and headlong sparked Kit Random’s yardwide cement with their heels.
In the next week the sounds that abounded in Kit Random’s abode might as well have been a saloon bowling alley. In just a handful of days, three various husbands visited at nine, ten, then ten after midnight, all with smiles like fake celluloid teeth hammered in place.
The various wives checked their breaths for liquid sustenance but inhaled only tart doses of medicinal mint; the men wisely gargled mid-street before charging up to confront their fortress Europas.
As for the disdained and affronted wives, what culinary battlements did they rear up? What counterattacks ensued? And if small battles, or skirmishes, were fought, did victories follow?
The problem was that the husbands backing off and then headlong racing off let all of the hot air out of their houses.
Only cold air remained, with three ladies delivered out of ice floes, refrigerated in their corsets, stony of glance and smile that in delivering victuals to the table caused frost to gather on the silverware.
Hot roast beef became tough icebox leftovers two minutes from the oven. As the husbands glanced sheepishly up from their now more infrequent meals, they were greeted with displays of glass eyes like those in the optician’s downtown window at midnight, and smiles that echoed fine porcelain when they opened and shut to let out what should have been laughter but was pure death rattle.
And then at last a night came when three dinners were laid on three tables by candlelight and no one came home and the candles snuffed out all by themselves, while across the way the sound of horseshoes clanking the stake or, if you really listened close, taffy being pulled, or Al Jolson singing, “Hard-hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, I don’t mean New Orleans,” made the three wives count the cutlery, sharpen the knives, and drink Lydia Pinkham’s Female Remedy long before the sun was over the yardarm.
But the last straw that broke the camel herd was the men ducking through a whirlaround garden sprinkler one untimely hot autumn night and, seeing their wives in a nearby window, they yelled, “Come onin,the water’sfine!”
All three ladies gave the window a grand slam.
Which knockedfiveflowerpots off rails, skedaddled six cats, and had ten dogs howling at no-moon-in-the-sky halfway to dawn.
The End
