The List

Halloween candy
Olive oil (the good kind, domestic, don’t get the cheap stuff)
Toothpicks
Gin
Garlic stuffed olives
Fresh basil
Red bell peppers (2)
Green bell (2)
Apples
Pasta (nothing flat. Get a shape.)
Bleach
Rubber Gloves
paper towels
Large plastic garbage bags
Matches
Lighter fluid
Drain cleaner

Stop by the hardware store and pick up some drop clothes, duck tape, a couple of hacksaw blades (to fit the old blue handle), Rat poison (the kind in the little green blocks) and a 50 pound bag of lime.
Love you. xoxox thanks.

Eric looked at the grocery list his wife had given him. Sometimes he asked her about the lists but he knew she’d get mad. Then he wondered if it was Duck Tape or Duct Tape. Was Duck Tape a brand. His daughter had talked about making a prom dress out of duck tape. Then he wondered who his wife was going to kill this time.

She was landscaping the yard. They were grilling a lot. She was going to paint the bathrooms. She had a list of people she thought the world would be better off without.

He thought of the box of newspaper articles his wife had kept. One was about a Girl Scout in troop 455 who had died when she fell into a pit toilet on a camping trip. His wife had been part of troop 455. One article was about a fifteen year old girl who’d vanished on a trip to the lake. Another was about a young man, a promising high school foot ball player, who lost his legs when a metal bookshelf in the library fell on him – a shelf that had been previously bolted to the wall in a section about ancient history that was rarely visited, except by this one boy who was a young scholar in Greek and Roman history. And yet another article was about a girl who vanished after going to the rest room at Senior Ball – the same year his wife was a senior in high school. One newspaper article, which was folded about twenty times, was about a college student, at the same university his wife attended, who was found strangled to death with a guitar string in the college library basement. He wasn’t wearing pants. The final article was about a woman his wife used to work for. She’d jumped out of the 5th floor of a building they’d been working in. On the way down she hit two people on the ground. All three died. Nobody knew why she’d jumped. She was known as rising star in her field and up for a promotion. After the funeral his wife took over her boss’s job.

Then he remembered that his eleven year old son told him not to get any gross Halloween candy in case they had left overs.

Eric was shaken out of his thoughts when his phone vibrated. There was a text from is wife.

Working late. But I think I’m getting the VP job. Have a feeling Bob might be going away. xoxox

He’d pick up some flowers on the way home too, just to keep his wife in a good mood.

~ end

~ Juliette aka Vampire Maman