a thirty first story...'frank's wife'

It took him half a life time but Frank finally said something sincere to his wife.  Over dinner one evening, with the kids all grown up, he told her he didn’t love her and her never had.  Then, as his wife sat in stunned silence, he added that he harboured homosexual designs on their neighbour’s son, Finley, and that their fledgling relationship had already been consummated in Finley’s parent’s basement garage, Wednesday last.

His wife fell off her chair backwards.  Or at least one could imagine her doing so.  In fact she picked up her steak knife and hurled it at Frank.  With the unerring accuracy of a member of the AKTA (American Knife Thrower’s Alliance), the blade pierced his pulmonary artery.  Frank was dead within the time it took his wife to clear his plate away.  She didn’t of course clear his plate away – and nor was she a member of the AKTA.

The police arrived an hour later after Frank’s wife had made a panicked telephone call to the local police department.  In fact, Frank’s wife didn’t telephone the local police department at all, and the police never showed up as a consequence.  What Frank’s wife did do was carefully place Frank’s hands around the handle of her steak knife, now safely embedded in Frank’s chest – she was trying to make it look like suicide – and then went around to their neighbour’s house armed with Frank’s Glock handgun. 

Finley politely answered the door only to find Frank’s wife unload three rounds of lead into his stomach before delivering the coup de grace to his forehead.  As Frank’s wife stepped over Finley’s bullet ridden corpse, his parents emerged from the living room.  Frank’s wife discharged four more rounds.  The first hit Finley’s father straight in his left eye, shattering his glasses, and the second, third and fourth blew off Finley’s mother’s right ear, and emptied her guts all over the hallway carpet.

As Finley’s mother lay bleeding to death, Frank’s wife put Frank’s handgun about a yard away from Finley’s body and, after fixing herself a gin and tonic back at home, went to bed.  During the middle of the night, Frank’s wife roused herself and once she had worked herself into a self-induced hysteria, she did at last make a panicked telephone call to the police.

‘My husband has killed himself!!’, she yelled into the receiver.  ‘Your husband has killed himself?’, replied the operator in an unwitting impersonation of a psychoanalyst.  ‘My husband has killed himself and I don’t know what to do!!’, Frank’s wife screamed.  ‘Your husband has killed himself and you don’t know what to do?’, replied the operator again.  ‘YES!!’ shrieked Frank’s wife.  ‘He has?’, asked the operator as if in genuine surprise.  ‘HE’S GOT A STEAK KNIFE THROUGH HIS HEART’, Frank’s wife was by now in a genuine frenzy, ‘He Was An Emotionally Redundant Faggot Anyhow!!’

~

The grandfather clock stuck eight.

Silence except for the sound of eating.

Frank’s wife picked at the contents of her dinner, and refused to make eye contact with Frank who was nonchalantly chewing over his steak: she thought of Frank and Finley smoking marijuana and fornicating next door, she thought of what to tell her children, and how to convey her suspicions to Finley’s parents.