Hell Found Me (standard:humor, 1525 words)
Author: MikeK	Added: Apr 12 2008	Views/Reads: 3183/2143	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
After a fight with his wife a man goes out on a limb - and then saws it off!

Hell Found Me 

Hell found me.  Naked and running from trailer to trailer until an old
woman was kind enough to lend me a towel her dog had been sleeping on.  
She was also kind enough to call the police. That part turned out all 
right though because I wouldn't have gone back for my truck without 
them. 

Now before you jump to any conclusions, I don't live in a trailer park. 
I don't even know anyone who does.  As for that plump brunette in that 
tight black cocktail dress, well... I didn't really know her.  Not that 
I'm blaming her.  She didn't expect her husband and her brother to 
return from their fishing trip that early in the day.  All I know for 
sure is that I now have a sense of what it is like to die and wake up 
in hell.  Mind you, at this point I deserved it.  Justice is not the 
issue. 

I woke to the sound of a door banging open and a light so bright I
thought it would melt the room.  I tried to focus in on the screeching 
half-nude woman clutching handfuls of my raw flesh and shoving me 
toward the door.  Even then I might not have moved, due to acute 
alcohol consumption of the previous night, except the phrase she was 
screeching over and over finally penetrated my sodden brain:  "My 
husband is home!" 

Now this is a gender thing.  Ever since the man crawled out of the
primordial slime and began to walk upright there are those expressions, 
in what ever language he develops, that are guaranteed to liberate 
whatever adrenaline is in his system.  "My husband is home!"  tops the 
list.  Mature women have been known, for the amusement of their 
friends, to holler this at their own napping husbands, and they will 
run out of their own houses and climb into their  cars before realizing 
where they are. 

I stumbled out the door and would have maintained my balance had the
last step not been missing.  My roll in the gravel was cut short by 
another of those motivational expressions, uttered in a guttural 
grunting tone, "Hey!  Who the hell is that!"  I was up on my feet and 
running faster than an NFL defensive end with an opening to the 
quarterback.  I had no real sense of where I was so I ran from trailer 
to trailer scaring whoever I encountered until the aforementioned old 
lady let me retain an old towel I grabbed from her small porch.  The 
previous owner of the towel, a rather large German Shepherd, might have 
recaptured the towel except it sensed my desperation and I sensed its 
age. 

At any rate, I returned with the police to that trailer and got my
wallet and keys (pitched out of a sliding window) but as for my 
clothes, they would not return them.  I demanded that the police go in 
and get them but they laughed and assured me that next to drunken 
spousal abuse confrontation with the authorities was their favorite 
pastime, and unless I agreed to go in and murder someone, they were not 
going to go into that trailer and get my clothes.  It would seem that 
out on the street half naked men reeking of alcohol and old dog have 
few rights. 

That left one more level of hell to descend to;  home to tell the wife. 
Now my wife is a good woman, better than I deserve, and an 
understanding woman, but showing up without my clothes, wrapped in a 
threadbare towel that smells like a dog – this was going to be a 
stretch.  The fight we had last night over what we were going to do for 
our sixth anniversary seemed a light year away,   and no doubt paled in 
comparison to not coming home at all.  In all the six years we have 
been married I had not once reverted back to my red-neck ways and this 
would be the theme I intended to cling to. 

Cautiously I opened the door to our apartment, hoping against all odds
that she had gone out for a while, but the soft sound of the TV told me 
she was here. 

"Ha, there you are.  I didn't know if I would see you today or not;  now
that you are a celebrity." 

"A celebrity?"  I mumbled, trying to make sense of that. 



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