Opera
Perhaps it was her tone. Yes, that was what fired his rocket, blew his top, wrung the neck of his patience and all that jazz. Every so often something bursts your bubble, pushes you over the brink, makes you red-faced… clichés like that. But he’d done it this time. Way over the top, rationality thrown somewhere over the rainbow. Poor little Dorothy has to put up with a lost rationale. Lucky her. He had to deal with a guilty conscience. A very guilty conscience. Guilty in more ways than one.
It all started with a cliché. Much like that one. He never did like opera. The high-pitched, high frequency vibratos would very quickly grate the cheese of his nerves into miniscule flecks perfectly sized for pizza topping. So much for the prissy Prima Donna strutting around the stage. Just another modern, real life Carlotta. Then again, the resonating basses of rotund, bearded masculinity never did much for his ‘calm demeanor’ either. ‘Twas all a façade, the passive face he wore whenever he was dragged inevitably to opera after opera. Like the similarly inevitable “I really enjoyed that!” nonsense he spouted after each one.
His thoughts were going off at a tangent with an angle ‘panic’ to the normal. Illogical trigonometry was the least of his worries right now. What mattered was how to cover up the crime, create a believable alibi, do all those things that the criminal did in Film Noir detective movies. It was either that or grab his imaginary ‘Tommy gun’ and make a last stand. His heart was pounding in his chest, like in those bad novels you read when you wanted to remind yourself of all the badness of novel clichés. Oxymoronic. He was in deep figurative mud.
Her voice was still playing in his head. The tone that stoked the flames of anger ever present, surreptitious in the back of his mind. It was distracting. Very distracting. Just thinking about it made the hairs on his neck rise. Well they would have if he was particularly hairy around the area. But he wasn’t.
He decided to give up thinking and make that last stand. He began laying his case. He would plead temporary insanity. Everyone snapped eventually. Some more violently than others. But he was prepared to face the music. Fervently hoping it wouldn’t be opera, he gathered the remains in his hands and steeled himself for the inescapable consequences. Oh, he was in deep water. Deep boiling water. No. Boiling mud to stick to the previous analogy. All because he lost his head and stifled the voice of that infernally singing pest. With a hammer. Smashed her along with the CD player. Who wouldn’t after having to listen to the same recording of Madame Butterfly for the third time that day. Here comes the opera-loving wife…
