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あらすじ・解説
Another set of tales improvised during lockdown. Content warning: bit sweary! Music: Creepy — Bensound.com. Here are some Totally Made Up Tales, brought to you by the magic of the internet. Grass never grows twice. It always leaves a stain. Refresh your browser often. It will speed everything up. Marry wisely, lest you fall badly into debt. Eliminate waste from your life using spoons and forks. Caring for people is hard. So care slightly left. Put your feet on somebody. It'll stool them slightly. It shouldn't be this hard, Freddy thought, to pick the right shade of red for your accent wall. He tried pillar box red, but it was too showy. He tried wine red, but it was too dull and gloomy. What I cannot cope with, he thought to himself, is the sheer range of options in the red catalog. He looked at the paint colour charts spread out on the ground before him. There must be more than 200 shades of red alone, and this was only from one range. He quivered to think what would happen if he went into B&Q to look at theirs. This was simply unacceptable and he would have to do something about it. I shall simply have to eliminate some of the colours of red from the spectrum, he thought. The easiest way to do this would be using some kind of reverse prism. Happily, Freddy was an esoteric sort of individual and had a whole cabinet full of prisms and various refractory implements, and he began to take them out, line them up, and judge which would be best. It took him three and a half years to determine the exact right combination of different-shaped and sized prisms to eliminate red from any colour light passing into the contraption. But he succeeded, and was dismayed to discover that, with some of the shades of reds now missing from the spectrum, everything was a little bit too blue. In fact, it seemed that there were now more blues than there had ever been before. And this truly offended his sense of balance and symmetry and all that is fair and equitable in the world, and he thought, well, I'm just going to have to get rid of some of this blue. And so, he returned to his cabinet of prisms and added more subtlety and different colours and shades of crystal to use in the prism contraption, and finally, after five years, was able to sit down and have to reduce the number of blues to a palatable number. The greenish tints that settled over everything was, to his eyes, even worse than the blue. And so, back and forth, this went on for several years, tinkering and adjusting each time. Until eventually, the only colour that was left was brown. And Freddy looked at it and it was a nice shade of brown. He liked the brown, and he put the brown on his wall, and he stepped back and thought, what this could do with is just a little bit of colour. The end. One morning, when Margaret got up, Jeffrey wasn't there. What was there, on the pillow next to her was a short note, which simply said, "Had enough. Good luck. Bye." But first, Margaret felt puzzled and somewhat thrown off balance by this. It seemed to come out of nowhere. She checked the wardrobes and the chest of drawers, just to be sure it wasn't a joke, but sure enough, everything that was Jeffrey's was gone. She went to work that day as usual, and got home again in the evening as usual and made dinner. And throughout the day, she wondered what exactly it was that she'd done wrong. She reflected as she went through her day, that nothing very much had changed. Apart from the fact that she was cooking for one, everything else was pretty much as usual. And yet, it felt so very, very empty. But, could she pin it down more specifically? What exactly was this emptiness, and how was she feeling it? She thought back to the beginning of the day. Where did the feeling of empty start? She realised that it had just started as soon as she woke, in a bed that was now only half full. "Aha," she said. It had continued as she had eaten her breakfast on her own, without her husband next to her, then got into her car to go to work, but without her husband next to her, sat down at her desk at work, without her husband next to her, and so on and so on. Every part of her day, just by herself, without her husband next to her. And she realised that more than anything, what she was missing was having something next to her all day. She considered her options, checked on the internet. What else could she put next to her? She narrowed it down to three options. Firstly, a dog, which she would have to feed. Secondly, a coffee machine, which would be convenient in some ways, but would be quite a heavy thing to carry around with her all the time. Thirdly, an avocado, which was deeply portable and heavily photogenic. Unfortunately, she had to discard the last option because she was worried that it wouldn't last. And so, she got herself a dog, but she always thought back that maybe an avocado would have been a better choice. She didn't vocalise this at first, but as the weeks ...