(Or..."I Love Alliteration!")
So, there I was in the bathroom (if you're having your morning breakfast with coffee, I'd suggest you wait until you finish before you read this very important post...).
Back to the bathroom...
The day started like any other, the sun roasting the mean city's sidewalks like eggs on a hot griddle. I was kicking back free style in my man cave (or what passes as my man cave, the john), attending to business, any ordinary day, when she walked in. The dame could've stopped traffic on an ice-covered freeway during rush hour. She had more curves than the crookedest street in Francisco.
The dame was my wife.
"What're you doin' here?" I asked the dame. "Can't you see I'm doing man's work? This ain't no place for a dame. Now, beat it, scram." I sprayed a can of Lysol, hoping she'd get my drift.
"Why are you being so weird?" she said.
I finished my business, getting rid of last night's whiskey. I wanted to shave, but couldn't, not with some dame hanging onto me. "You need an armed escort, lady? You heard me, beat feet!"
Things happened fast. We jockeyed for space, arms flailing around one another for towels and soap and toilet paper and make-up, a vertical game of Twister. Suddenly, my elbow smacked the cotton ball cup sitting on the back of my white throne. I watched as the cup shattered like a puzzle and the white balls snowed down upon the tiled floor.
"Now look what you did," she shouted, her lips drawn back in a ferocious, feral, yet enticing sneer. "Be careful!"
"It takes two to tango, baby, see? You can't lay that calamity on my broad shoulders alone."
"Quit being weird! And pick up your cotton balls!"
"Lissen up, toots, and lissen good, before I take you over my knee and give it to ya! They ain't my cotton balls, see, you're the one who brought them in here."
"Uh, no I didn't. You did! And speak normally!"
"You're not hangin' that rap on me, sister. I ain't standin' for it one iota, not for one second. I'm a man and men don't have no use for cotton balls just like men have no use for nipples!"
She glowered at me like Johnny Law grillin' me under the hot lamps. Only thing missing was a phone book and rubber hose. Finally, illumination blinked behind the dame's headlights. Her full lips formed a perfect "O," the kind I could get lost in for days.
"Ohhhhh," she said, "Mom must've put the cup there the last time she was here."
"Well," I said, tilting my hat back so the dame could get a good view of the victory in my peepers, "this looks like another--"
"Stop it."
"...another case wrapped up by me. Now I could use a good, stiff--"
"Cut it out!"
"...drink to wash the dirtiness outta my gritty street life and detec--"
"I'm going to work." And just like that, she was gone. She blew into my man cave like a whirling dervish and vanished like some kind of hallucinatory siren from the depths, her hold on me still strong, until I began to doubt if she'd been real or just a lingering fever dream from my two-day hangover.
Until she got home from work and wanted to know why I hadn't picked up the cotton balls.
--From the case files of Stu West, P.I.
Wow! Pow! Swak! If you want more hard-boiled thrills, chills, and blood spills (none of that sissy cotton ball stuff), check out my Killers Incorporated trilogy, a darkly comical thriller series about serial killers and conspiracies, not for the faint-hearted!
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