His One Consolation

“Heh,” she says. “Heh!”

He doesn’t say much of anything. His hands are tied, but not his feet — so it’s easy for him to get up walk to the kitchen and use the scissors with a backwards grasp to cut himself free of his hand restraints while she is doing her make up. Instead of surprising her with an all out assault, he walks out into the sunshine and walks away toward the police station a mile down the road. But she strikes him down with her new car. Her car  is really more of an assault SUV — she’s certainly using it in this manner — and she quickly disposes of him. His body a mangled mess caught under the chassis. His one consolation as he was crushed , then mashed, was that he fouled up her new transmission.

“We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
— Henry James