I Woke Next to the Corpse by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

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make, what fed into their need to set up a patsy for a jolt before joe.

The light blue throw rug had a white poodle face in its center which smiled insipidly saying; “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” Yeah, right pooch. Nice for kids, I guess. Despite the poodle’s assurance, I had no fantasies about getting out of this place alive. But, I was determined and actually semi-contented to do my best to avoid Old Sparky and take as many of the flunky bastards with me as I could.

As soon as I had woken up I sensed that something was wrong as I saw that Margie had left with the car, leaving me a note on the kitchen table that she had gone into town to stock up on groceries. Sure, we needed groceries, but it wasn’t exactly an emergency at the moment and also was not a problem which required the assistance of the entirety of my five G poke.

Rather than making change for the stash I had buried in my

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wallet, Margie had absconded with the wad, and gone with the wind, leaving me sporting lint.

To its internal visual credit, the cabin in the woods that Margie had brought me to looked as if no owner had engaged a staging “designer” since the early 1930’s. There was real wood and wood paneling everywhere collecting dust you could write on, when it wasn’t puffing like a squeezed Raggedy Ann or Andy stuffed doll. Though darkly stained, it seemed an enlightening improvement over the glued and plastic “home” products which cheaply and efficiently overtook quantifiable things and quality considerations in the “lumberyard” contracting sections. Tom Greenberg, owner of Tom Winters Construction knows the score. He makes a point of showing you the unreadable and alleged receipt for the product, while saying how much he has saved you. It’s pointless to try making a point; so you make a faux grin at the crinkled paper, in hopes of that putting an end to the lowdowns of the larcenous, quality absent, tedium; simultaneously realizing that that what-can-you-do reaction was exactly what had been programmed into everyone by the Greenbergs of the contracting world. Though unsuccessful in their undisclosed lack of effort to aesthetically ape their predecessors, in the mid-20th century, the Greenbergs rake in the nickels and dimes like a shyster pawn broker with a sharp eye. His “genius” is that

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“big and cheap” always beats “small and expensive,” except in Tiffany’s.

With expected death on the horizon, one might wonder why I was thinking these things. What can I tell those who haven’t been there? One’s mind goes where it will, just as much as any ding-dong. And what can I bore those who have been with? It was logically and pragmatically unexplainable, though more real than any meta abomination. My lackadaisical attitude had led to my being a doomed patsy. That’s all there is to it. No regrets. For the short run, I was no one’s junior deputy.

I Woke Next to the Corpse