Fictionlet
When it comes to chewing the scenery when she’s mad, Brigid makes Jeremy Irons look subtle and restrained. Unfortunately, we were rapidly running out of delicate electronic instruments to smash and she was giving my precious laptop a homicidal look. I was forced to come to its rescue.
“Well, look,” I said, in as soothing a tone as I could muster, “family’s always a pain. You have no farther to look than my Uncle Bob for confirmation of that. But in her own harpy-like way, your mother loves you. That’s got to be worth something, doesn’t it? Why not forgive the old biddy?”
Brigid, who had apparently been lost in a pleasant fantasy about the horrors she planned to inflict on my poor little Toshiba, looked over at me with narrowed eyes. “What did you say?” she said.
“I was just observing that your mother loves you,” I said. “Surely you can get past this little estrangement with a little compromising, a little give-and-takeness.”
“You were observing that, were you?” she said.
“I was.”
“Well don’t. Honestly, that’s about the most fatuous comment since the technician at Chernobyl said, ‘I wonder what this button does!'”
I had to stop and chew on that one a bit; by the time I’d come up for air, the little punk had hurled our last telephone into the kitchen, where it took out two cereal bowls and a mug that had been hiding in the sink trying to escape notice.
-The Gneech
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