For James
It was a dark, gloomy February evening. I was bored. The party was canceled, my husband was away for the weekend and there was nothing on TV that I wanted to watch. I called everyone I knew, but my friends were either lazy or busy or just as bored as I was.
I ordered pizza. The guy who delivered my order looked like someone who tortured small animals. Maybe he jumped in for someone because I could not imagine that Giovanni's Fine Italian restaurant would hire someone like that. You expected a shady mafia type guy to arrive at your door. This was to add some spice to your pizza experience, not disgust.
I shut the door as quickly as I could. The pizza was too large for two, but I decided to eat it all by myself. Candles, Merlot, and Miles Davis. Nice!
And yet, Friday evening all alone was not my idea of fun...
I remembered a joke that was making rounds on facebook. "If you are bored, send a message to a random number..." This was such a fun idea! I took my iPhone and composed the suggested message: "I hid the body... now what?" The message went to a number I dialed without even looking at the keys.
I took another bite of my pizza and there it was. Faster than I would even think. "What did you do with the knife?"
Interesting, I thought. Whoever was there must have been just as bored as I was. "There was no knife!" I answered.
Seconds later a new message came. "You did not look under the bed!" "Oh, yes! I did!" I was laughing. This was turning to be quite a fun!
An angry message came back seconds later "I told you to check carefully you idiot!"
Was someone overdoing it or something? "I did my job. I want my money now!" I wrote.
"You will get nothing!" was the answer.
I took a large sip of wine and tried to think of something funny to make the person on the other side even more furious. And just as I was ready to type the message I heard a loud bang on my door. "Police! Open the door!"....
By Dominique Allmon
Image "Between past and present" by Nico De Pasquale
I Hid the Body... Now What? by Dominique Allmon is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.