It Tightened and Tangled, Like a . . .

I participated in yesterday's Five Minute Fiction. I missed the cutoff mark because I started late and had a nursing baby on my lap that kept kicking the keyboard. Oh, well. Maybe next time. It was fun, and here are the results of my brain dump.

In your entry you must include the phrase: “It tightened and tangled, like a”

“I’m telling you the damn thing came alive!” He’s angry. His vein popping out of his forehead.

I shouldn’t have laughed. I shouldn’t have when he fell, but he just looked so stupid — arms flailing about reaching at nothing, legs all bunched up together in that stupid orange cord that he’s left on the laundry room for weeks. Weeks! I’ve been telling him to put that damn thing away, and did he listen? No, of course not because he was busy with the chickens or the clothes on the line or his precious potato patch.

So do I feel sorry that he tripped and fell on the cord? Hell, no. Do I feel bad for laughing at him? Hell, no.

So I walk away, laundry basket on my hip.

“You’re not even gonna ask me if I’m okay?” he asks.

“Nope. Because you’re fine.” I step over the threshold and into the kitchen where the baby is crying, arms up, waiting to be held.

“Well, what if I had gotten hurt?”

“You didn’t. And I tripped on that cord no less than ten times last week. You’re just being a baby because you know that you should have moved it when I asked you to in the first place.”

Take that, lazy husband of the year. Okay, not lazy just a bad listener or something.

“Come on. I don’t even get a ‘honey, I’m glad you’re okay’?”

“No,” I say, laughing as I set down the laundry and pull the baby into my lap to comfort her.

He stands before me, hand on his head, scratching. That’s attractive. Some days I wonder why I married him. Today is one of those days.

“It tightened and tangled, like a freaking vine of devil’s snare,” he blurts.

I take that back.

Because . . . no, he didn’t. I can’t take it! I crumble in laughter over the top of the baby’s head. My husband, the man who hates fantasy, hates it with a passion and makes fun of me every time I watch a movie or read a book in that genre is comparing the orange cord of doom to devil’s snare. It’s straight out of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

I catch my breath and snap my tears-of-joy-blurry eyes to his. “Um, when did you . . .”

“I didn’t,” he says abruptly and heads back to the laundry room where he puts away the devil’s snare so no one else gets hurt!