Alethiology: The Elephant's Hand

Chapter 5

"Sorry about that," Aletheia said, picking the toast up from the furry fabric. "Are you disturbed?"

"Uh," Sherman said. "No?"

"Yeah," Aletheia said. "We're lucky it landed on the carpet, and not the tiles."

"Why?" Sherman asked.

"Don't you know? As the germaphobe, you'd have taken note of something like that. A real, well-educated germaphobe. Not a five-second rule sort of person."

"Oh, I've heard that's just untrue. A false idea."

"Yes," Aletheia replied. "Pretty much. But you don't know about the thing about carpets?"

"No," Sherman said. "I mean, I try not to eat anything that drops anywhere near the floor. Carpets or tiles." His nostrils flared.

"Well," Aletheia explained, "the carpet is hairy, see," she pointed at some of the curly strands with the wooden hand of her backscratcher. She twirled them casually. "So there is a smaller surface area for any food to contact when it falls atop it. It's unintuitive, I know. We are used to thinking of thick fabric as dirt-collecting and filthy—partially true, there's greater surface area in the same two-dimensional slice for microbes to inhabit, when all three dimensions are considered—but the bread touches the carpet in only one plane, at the few points where the hairs meet it, so there is much less opportunity for anything to crawl onto my food. The tiled floor, on the other hand, is flat and smooth. A slice of bread would contact its entire surface at once, and the whole area's worth of microbes could be exchanged."

Sherman nodded inattentively as Aletheia rambled. He glanced down at the coconut jam smeared on the carpet.

"I'm going to take another bite of this, if you don't mind," Aletheia said. "I know the five-second rule is fake, but still, I don't mind risking it."

"You know," he said, "I actually think you should stop eating in my house. At least not right now. My wife has just been murdered. I would have expected some form of decency from you people, instead of whatever this is." Sherman frowned. His nostrils flared.

Eric Collins glanced over Clements' shoulder and scoffed at Aletheia.

"Agent Clements," Collins uttered, "your consultant has got a complaint."

"What?" Clements turned away from Collins.

He noticed the bread in her hands. He stormed over. He took the bread from her hands.

"Hey!" Aletheia groaned.

"No more snacking on the job," Clements commanded. "That's final." He bagged the bread in the plastic and shoved it into his suit jacket pocket.

"Thank you," Sherman said to Clements. "She was making me uncomfortable with her blatant disrespect." His nostrils flared again. It was getting too obvious to ignore.

"Oh, come on," Aletheia whined. "I was only eating breakfast over your dead wife's body. It's not like I killed her."

"Excuse me?" Sherman yelled.

"Oh damn it, Aletheia!" Clements exclaimed.

"Which one is more disrespectful?" Aletheia asked. "Performing shenanigans before a corpse, or turning a living, breathing human being into a corpse?"

"What?" Sherman spat. "Agent Clements, this is unacceptable!"

"The latter is worse, wouldn't you say so?" Aletheia prodded.

She tossed the backscratcher in the air so it rotated 360 degrees, before catching it in the nick of time. Shoving the end with the wooden hand towards Sherman, she tapped on his shoulder.

"Wouldn't you say so?" she repeated.

"Yes!" Sherman shouted. "And get that off me, you crazy bitch!"

"Why?"

"It's utterly disrespectful! Utterly!"

"You had one chance to say that its because it's dirty with dust and carpet grime, but you threw it out the window. You defenestrated it. That's a word, by the way."

"Aletheia!" Clements barked.

"Clements," Aletheia called out, "draw your gun, this man disrespected his wife way more than I ever did. He killed her. He killed her. Murderer alert!"