FICTION | OBSERVATION | WRITING CHALLENGE
A Bad and Good Spouse
They are just living next door.
“Don’t we love our neighbor? They are so quiet today.”
“Did you see the constructor or plumber come out?”
“No, why, silly. Why are you asking me that? I’m not spying on our neighbor.”
“We need a plumber because we got a clogged pipe upstairs.”
“Oh! You can call someone else. But, I guess the guy charges us less.”
More than six months later, they were reading together. It happened to be about their neighbor.
<Ten Word Story>
Their two daughters, friends, parents, and grandchildren came to play.
The home constructors and the plumber went into the house.
Their friends came, cleaning people came or just their friends.
The wife asked her husband for a real RV trip.
The husband — no brainer to understand the heck she muttered.
The plumber came to the house with a surveillance camera.
She figured out he snapped and lost his mind more.
Police came to search for their house, farms, and apartments.
The plumber did not come out of it by himself.
The husband was responsible for the missing plumber, hidden deeply.
She noticed his weird behaviors; yet tried to save him.
Because she knew he was abused when he was young.
He regrets over-protecting her, devaluing lives, and torturing the plumber.
“Did you hear that? The plumber you were trying to call could be undercover police.”
“I knew it. Something is odd about the house. He showed me a dead animal photo he shot. He didn’t hunt those to eat. I felt he was like a serial killer, keeping the trophy for himself.”
“I know, the photo thing was quite bizarre. Once the wife was holding the smartphone, and he commanded her not to erase those photos. We both looked at each other and paused for one second.”
“Oh, and it says the husband and a seemingly married male friend with cosmetic surgery and probable faked identity worked for similar bad organizations, targeting the females living in their houses. And the husband was getting paid by that since his college years. No wonder he kept the backstage job at a restaurant for over eight years. No one would stay that long after graduating from the university unless you are trying to become the best chef, waiter, or manager in a five-star hotel or something. That is so spooky. I guess, the control freak controls another control freak.”
“Yeah, I thought that was strange, more than eight years, huh? What?! Oh, dear, oh moose. It says the wife was also in a bad organization.”
“Seems like she was. She served as a pre-trainer?! Of assassins?! For real? She made young or introverted people miserable at first, then asked them to take care of small animals, like fish, but led them to kill the small pets in some ways. That’s so sick!”
“I bet, the couple must have been trying to kill each other at some point.”
“Oh, it just reminded me of when we last visited their house…”
“What? Did you see anything?”
“There was a female tenant who tried to wash her hands before dinner, and he approached the sink and quietly said to her, Wash your hands while you still have skin. That was blood-curdling. I had no idea why he would say something like that to her. Did he grow up with parents saying such things? She was also stunned and looked at him once, washed her hands, and left. She left before something bad happened to her, though the major surgery she had to go through was very suspicious. Can you believe he was also linked to one of those doctors who operated on the female tenant? Oh, it says they are questioning the doctors and will probably suspend their licenses to practice. At least she got out of the hospital and house safely.”
“Ugh, creepy. I was mostly busy talking to the wife and eating. We probably shouldn’t have gone to their place and eaten their food. We could be killed or half-killed, and they would happily send some kinds of cleaning, doctors, or rehab experts to take our money. Who knows if the doctors were experimenting without consent? We should get rid of the supplements the couple gave us.”
“That sounds like organized crime…no matter whether you ate real foods or supplements. Once they make patients almost die on the table, they experiment, tape, and show it because they were “trying to save”. Things were carried out without consent. Those people are the freaky monkeys. The Modern Bank Rubbers and Breaching of Protection of Personal Information.”
“After decades, The wife finally realized she couldn’t pull him out of the organized, high society crime and recently was ready to buy an RV for a trip as their last journey. Such a poor guy, but I shouldn’t pity him. He was involved with a few deaths and changed the trajectories of many lives. Hey, you can use your hunch or twist, whatever you call it, and finish writing up your novel before our trip to the north. The title should be something like A Small Starving Man Working for Wrong Organization Turned Himself into a Villain.”
“My genius wife!”
The plumber was found in a dark space tied up.
The husband kept asking him where the videos were sent.
He never revealed his Interpol identity for over a year.
Only the plumber knew where the husband's missing rings went.
In the final paragraph, it says:
Every time the husband tried to quit, they asked him, “How is your family doing (with an accent)?” Words and phrases that haunted him in the past have made him an angry and insensitive person who whispers those words and phrases into victims’ ears to control and freak out humans. He was only a quarter human.
Thanks for reading/listening.
I’m tagging writers who may be interested in reading this, overflowed ten-word patties with the conversation buns and a big slice of paragraph pickle.
Toni Greathouse, Shereen Bingham, Ravyne Hawke, EP McKnight, MEd, Amanda Laughtland, Ellie Jacobson, Marilyn Flower, Karen Schwartz, Penny Grubb