Mother's Little Helper

Here's another excerpt from Second Day Reported. Hope you're having a great day!

My ex-mother-in-law posed spouses at the edge of family pictures so that in the even that they should divorce, she could cut them out of the photograph with an exacto knife. I can still see her at the kitchen table with her gas-station mug filled with Diet Coke and some version of a mother’s little helper (vodka usually because of the lack of smell), wearing one of her hideous housedresses which was strange given that she was an attractive woman but went to great lengths to hide it except once when she went to the Denton Gold Triangle mall and had a series of Glamour Shots taken -- most of them were all right, but the nautical these that permeated most of them proved to be a mistake. She’d ease the pictures out of their frames and set to work while I’d see if there were any stray painkillers in her bathroom which was usually a safe bet given the never-ending nature of her female trouble. She had troubles all right, the kind that go on and on. Nobody wanted to listen, most of all my husband, her son.

One night she called us to her house telling us it was an emergency. "Hide my gun," she said. "I feel like putting it in my mouth."

My husband sighed, unloaded the chamber, and put it back in the dresser drawer, nestled in her underwear. He’d started to get an inkling that my own mental health was a little dicey, and he had has his fill. We hadn’t had that much fun and we weren’t going get well no more. He’d been trying to get away form a particular house of horrors, only to step into another. Life was funny that way, fucking hysterical.

Michelle's Spell of the Day

"Better times perhaps await us who are now wretched." Virgil

Cocktail Hour

Drinking memoir suggestion: Lessons In Becoming Myself Ellen Burstyn

Benedictions and Maledictions

Happy Thursday!