…tap tap tap.
“I see you’re using my name for this deidre
project.”
“Whose would I use?”
“I wasn’t consulted.”
“I see you’ve decided to crawl out of your little
bunny cage now. Where were you the other day when I
had time to do some writing?”
“Sleeping. Why are you calling it `Secrets’?
Isn’t that giving it away? How about `The Beast’?”
“One word title rule. Haven’t you read anything
deidre wrote? Besides, get over `the beast’ thing.
Seriously.”
Tap tap tap…
…”There’s no other way to get our data back. The
hard-drive is almost trashed.”
She looked at the monitor’s blank screen, no
trace of the Window’s 95 colors or icons remaining.
“What does your program do, exactly?”
I slipped the floppy into the disk drive and
re-booted the machine. “It just tries to bring back
everything that was stored on the computer. Hopefully
it will get all our financials back. I should have
bought that zip backup.”
She watched the little 486 power back up, noticed
me watching her, and smiled warily. “It will get
everything back, then?”
I rubbed her shoulders and felt her tense.
“It should. Everything that hasn’t been
over-written or corrupted.”…
…tap tap tap.
“Who uses 486’s and Windows 95 these days?”
“This isn’t happening `now’.”
“So when is it happening?”
“Figure it out. Sometime between ’95 and ’98.”
“Ahh, subtle.”
“Subtlety is what it’s all about.”
“Maybe. Maybe it’s also about tying and gagging
and whipping and crying and surprising and lesbian
kisses and evil twists.”
“Sometimes it is. Definitely twists, although
rarely evil. Innocence, too.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“Pithiness. That’s the point. Don’t you have
something better to do?”
“Nope. Stop pithing on my parade.”
Tap tap tap…
…I woke sometime around midnight and realized she
wasn’t sleeping beside me. Soundlessly, I padded out
to the hall and followed the soft glow to the doorway
of the den. She was sitting at the computer, head
resting on her arms, gently snoring. I padded in,
quietly realizing how delicate she looked, especially
when she slept. Two of our kids would grow up to look
just like her.
The program was still chugging away but I noticed
that she had inserted a floppy of her own into the
drive and had copied a few files from the machine as
they were recovered. She was typically a sound
sleeper but I still moved quietly to pull out the
floppy she had and replaced it with a fresh one. I
slipped her disk into the pocket of my robe and padded
back to bed…
…tap tap tap.
“He’s going back for some ropes, right? Gonna go
and rope that wife of his. Tie up her breasts, you
know.”
“Do you have any idea why that sounds silly? Why
that totally is `not’ what is going to happen next?”
“It never sounded silly before. Breasts `always’
get tied in our stories.”
“You haven’t a clue, have you?”
“Perhaps.”
Tap tap tap…
…She got back home from her Aids Awareness
luncheon a little late. I was home early and I knew
she didn’t expect me. The kids wouldn’t be home from
school for a few hours yet. A worried look crossed
her face when she saw me home at this hour but that
look changed to curiosity when she noticed the bag in
my hand. Without a word I pulled a silk scarf from
the bag, blindfolded her and led her into the kitchen.
She tensed and almost tore the blindfold off when
I gave her over to Celeste, our next-door neighbor.
Celeste whispered to her in reassuring tones and I
knew that the rest of the scarves in my bag wouldn’t
be necessary, not that Celeste didn’t know how to tie
someone tightly.
Celeste bent her over the kitchen table and with
a wink in my direction, slapped my wife’s ass a few
times before taking the K-Y Jelly from my bag. My
wife moaned but didn’t protest as Celeste applied the
cool jelly and I wondered if she would let me take her
ass right then. But with a knowing grin, Celeste
wordlessly buckled on the strap-on and shooed me away.
I pulled the floppy from my breast pocket and
closed the door to the den. I’d never contemplated
Celeste wanting to bring my wife into it. It was the
floppy – Celeste loved the floppy. My wife was one
hell of a writer, that was for sure. As I heard her
moaning in pleasure from beyond the den door I
wondered how much writing she would have time for now.
Or whether it was needed…
…tap tap tap.
“Now what?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happens next? He goes back out and they
both do his wife? Whose name, by the way, happens to
be deidre?”
“I should be so presumptuous.”
“But that’s what you’ve done, isn’t it? You’ve
written about deidre.”
“Look, this story is about a suburban housewife
who gets a pleasant surprise when her loving husband
stumbles onto her kinks and decides to start giving
them to her in real life. The twist is that the
husband was into it already, only not with his wife
but with his wife’s best friend.”
“So much for subtlety now, right? You pithed on
your own story. You’re also presuming to explain what
happened to deidre.”
“Get back in your bunny cage. Or your cement
coffin, or hidden basement root cellar or wherever
you’re calling home these days.”
“Don’t talk to your muse like that. I might just
fall asleep for a long, long time.”
“So, what else is new?”
“And you want to know another thing? I’m going
to keep all this in. Just so everyone knows how you
treat me. And I’m calling it what I want, one word
title rule or not.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”