MOLLY ANN BLAKOWSKI
One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Ornithorhynchus anatinus
18
My wife doesn’t like it. In fact, that’s an understatement—she detests it. I brought it home the other day. Yes, it must have been on Tuesday—the Natural History Museum has reduced admission prices on Tuesdays, and I reap the benefits of this hot deal like clockwork each week. I punch out, zip my jacket over my dirty uniform, and drive the old Toyota downtown to my glorified Tuesday sanctuary. “My mother’s sick again,” my wife said with a voice as saggy as her gravitationally-tailored memories-of-breasts, mashing her utensils into our usual Wednesday night dinner. Meatloaf and potatoes from a box. “I’m driving over to stay with her this weekend.” “Oh. Send her my get well wishes,” I offered. What a joke that was. Things haven’t been so hot between my mother-in-law and me since last Thanksgiving, and quite frankly, I wouldn’t give a damn if the old broad finally fell over and croaked somewhere in her dusty, old ranch house on Featherton Avenue. The one that smells like sour cottage cheese and mothballs and everything else old and unpleasant. Serves her right. “I will.” You know, any sane person would let bygones be bygones after a whole year. But my mother-in-law, she’s definitely insane. What happened was, last Thanksgiving, after we’d polished off all five pounds of the post-feathery meal that Ben Franklin once wished to make our national bird, and had grown drowsy from the tryptophan, I’d slipped down the hallway and into her bedroom to…admire a few collectables while the ladies prepared hot coffee and pumpkin pie. And well, I’m surprised how she even saw that pink little porcelain cat tucked into my shirt pocket, what with her failing vision and all. Clearly, she overreacted. Anyhow, ever since, that old, senile bat has treated me like a complete criminal. I chewed my meatloaf loudly to compensate for my wife’s sudden silence. It worked for a few minutes, until she cleared her throat and gave me the look. “You know what I’m going to say to you.” She glared across the table with the ferocity of a rabid lynx, like the one I saw two Tuesdays ago at the museum. Though that particular one had no eyes—it’d been a mere skeletal representation. “Don’t you?” “Oh, sure, sure,” I rebutted casually. “Water the flowers, keep up the kitchen, sure, sure, I know the drill.” Phew. Safe.