“It’s like I always say: never trust something that bleeds for a week out of every month and lives to complain about it every go-round,” the man growled into the receiver. He chuckled at his own joke, quick and deep, before repositioning the stogie dangling between his teeth and calling gruffly into the kitchen, “My sandwich ready yet, babe?”
“Just a minute, hon!” his wife trilled back cheerfully after adding her personal favorite ingredient from the unmarked bottle that she kept in the very back of her spice rack.
Later that night, she reflected that the telephone receiver would probably always smell like cigar smoke, so she should probably invest in a new one. “It’s just like you always say,” she told her sister, a recent widow and sandwich-making extraordinaire, “Some men just can’t hold their arsenic. Now I hate to rush off, but I can hear the sirens already and I don’t look nearly distraught enough over my dear, departed husband.”
Hanin Writes Things 