Whacking Poetic and the Notes to My Future Wife

Chapter 2

A deafening minor third snapped Sam out of a daze. He twirled around to a blinding spotlight and the realization that he was still standing in the street even though Alex had already driven away. He stepped to the side and watched dumbly as the car that had honked accelerated in the direction of his wife.

Sam's head was swirling, and a golf ball was now bouncing around in his stomach. What had just happened? Could Alex have not found a better time to have such a traumatizing conversation? Maybe she had thrown that turd on the table just to spitefully ruin his adolescent CD release gig.

But who knows what went through her head these days? She spent so much time at the hospital he was lucky to see her most days. She could be having an affair. He'd never know it. She could be planning to move out tomorrow and take all their money. He'd never know that either, as she handled the money.

But was she having an affair? It didn't seem her style, but maybe he had misread her all these years.

He turned and wandered up the sidewalk towards the house that she had admired so much. There were several students, most in costumes, standing outside talking on the grass and even more on the front porch. He stopped and studied the strategically placed dormant azaleas, rose bushes and other shrubs that he couldn't name that lined the sidewalk. Alex would know them all and if they lived there would rave about each of them at the appropriate time of the year. This house was exactly what she was looking for. It was old and mature. It was probably beautiful in the summer, but right now the dying autumn vegetation made it look like a worn-out grandma house.

Sam pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at the face - 7:08 pm. He had to snap out of it or else he wouldn't be able to concentrate on stage. He could certainly withstand a few hours of Alex-driven drama until Phil handed him the validation he had always craved.

A personal life plan? He was sure it would blow over. It was typical for Alex to be mistakenly convinced that something was wrong. There was that time during her first year of medical school when she started having hand tremors and bouts of confusion, which she was sure were the first signs of Parkinson's disease. Then when the headaches, weight loss and general fatigue added to the mystery, and by coincidence the focus of her studies shifted to oncology, she was even more confident that she actually had a brain tumor. Perhaps this personal life plan crisis could be solved in the same manner as that horrible ailment, which turned out to be a classic case of medical school sleep deprivation. A long weekend at Carolina Beach or maybe simply a day or two away from the office would cure everything.

A personal life plan - he wondered if there was a song lyric there. He could almost always turn pain into poetry. Maybe there was something about the irony of something intended to help you that was instead actually constricting. Guided by my personal life plan – it was too literal sounding, but he would still write it down later.

"Jason, you have the creativity of a shrew," said a female voice from the general direction of the house.

Sam looked up and it was as though he was looking into a mirror. "Damn, what a handsome man you are," he said without thinking, as he found himself face-to-face with another person wearing a Homer Simpson mask. The second Homer had been walking away from the house and had stopped abruptly in front of him on the sidewalk.

"Huh?" the other Homer grunted in a gravelly voice. "Oh yeah." His costume really only amounted to a similar mask, as a half-hearted football jersey with the sleeves torn off and jeans completed the outfit.

"D'oh! I hate having two heads!" Sam said in his best Homer Simpson voice. "Ooh, that's a vague reference." He smiled at his own joke.

"Uh... what are you talking about?" the deep voice replied with a note of mockery. The face under the mask appeared appropriately rounded and unshaven.