CUTTING

 Another story from my collection, Phoning It In, Cutting is a horror story about a marriage and, while not all disgruntled husbands or wives have access to supernatural lawnmowers, I'm sure some people out there will relate.

CUTTING

Clive Selby was not a quitter. He had been nursing tough, barren gardens back to health since he was a boy, and considered himself somewhat of an expert on the subject. The same could not be said for marriage.

He had married Gwendolyn Jeffers when he was eighteen, and by the time she informed him that their little burden wouldn’t be troubling them after all, Gwendolyn had made herself so indispensable that Clive didn’t have the heart to let her go. Twenty years on, he was beginning to suspect that he may have been hoodwinked.

‘My love?’

‘What is it now?’

‘Well…I…’

‘Spit it out, idiot.’

‘I was just thinking about our honeymoon, when we stayed at that lovely little place, do you remember?’

‘How could I forget? I had to wear neck to knee wool the entire time.’

‘Yes. It was rather foolish of me to organise an unheated seaside cottage in the dead of winter.’

‘You couldn’t organise a glass of milk on a dairy farm; I saw to everything.’

‘Oh yes, silly me. Still, you weren’t to know we’d be snowed in.’

‘Of course not.’

‘You got so ill after that. You couldn’t get that flu out of your system for four months.’

‘What ARE you babbling on about?’

‘I felt sorry for you, is all; the first year of marriage is supposed to be all romance and euphoria. We couldn’t even share a bed until after…well…’

Gwendolyn stopped drinking her coffee and froze with the cup held mid air.

‘What exactly are you driving at?’

‘Oh, nothing, dear one.’

Clive smiled at his wife reassuringly, hoping she wouldn’t be able to read the terror in his eyes. The time he dared put salt on his steak was still fresh in his mind, thanks to the griddle pattern tattooed on the back of his hand, and the permanently absent thumbnail on his right hand served as a permanent reminder not to shout out the answer on Millionaire before Gwendolyn had finished thinking it.

In short, Gwendolyn Selby-Jeffers ( as she preferred to be called) did not like to be challenged. If Clive was to gain the information he needed without suffering further disfiguring repercussions, more clandestine methods would be called for.

Gwendolyn was organised; if she had one redeeming quality, that would be it. She kept detailed records of everything from household expenditure to the food she ate, and Clive waited for her to take her weekly trip to play the slots before venturing upstairs.

He spent two hours carefully removing and replacing floral ring binders of varying sizes – the bills book was the thickest, while the marital relations journal looked more like a pamphlet – before finally conceding defeat.

Then it came to him, the one place Gwendolyn could hide something and virtually guarantee her weak-watered husband would never find it: the spider room.

Clive had confessed to being a confirmed arachnophobe on their second date, so he was surprised to say the least when Gwendolyn announced, just after they lost the baby, that she was starting up a collection of the large, tropical monsters that had populated his nightmares since boyhood.

He went to the door at the end of the hall, after dressing himself in four layers of clothing, donning his gardening gloves, and arming himself with a spray bottle of water and a pair of tongs, and turned the door knob with a shaky hand.

The room was lined wall to wall with tanks, each singularly occupied by spiders that ranged in size from Hold In Your Hand to For The Love Of God, Cover Your Face. The process of elimination wouldn’t be necessary this time. Clive pulled down the mask he used to prevent inhalation of garden chemicals, slid the lid across, and held his tools at the ready.

Clive was pleasantly surprised to find that, much like his mistress, Larry the Australian Table Spider was adverse to exerting himself unless there was something in it for him.

Clive moved aside a rock in the far corner of the tank and pulled out a small red notebook. As expected, every day of the week of their frigid honeymoon was marked with a big red P. He put back the rock, slid the lid back on the tank, tucked the notebook under his arm and went downstairs to wait for his wife.

It was seven thirty before she swayed in the door on a cloud of two dollar beer and aftershave that smelled twice as cheap. She leered down at him like a ravenous jackal.

‘I don’t smell dinner…why are you sitting at the table?’

‘I need to speak to you.’

Gwendolyn tossed her hair, tottered, then righted herself.

‘Speak to me? Since when do you condescend to speak to me using such an assertive tone?’

‘Since,’ Clive chirped.

He cleared his throat.

‘Since I know you lied about being pregnant. I have proof.’

He took the book out from under his arm and held it up.

‘I want a divorce, on the grounds of deceit.’

‘I only did it because I wubbed you so.’

Gwendolyn pulled a cutesy face – the kind she employed whenever she used to talk about their fictitious child to be. The cuteness was somewhat diminished by the drunk way the corners of her mouth quivered as she tried to pucker her lips.

‘I just couldn’t stand by and let another girl steal you away.’

‘Or steal my money.’

‘That’s just not true, Cli-Cli, not true at all.’

‘You can keep the cars.’

‘Don’t be silly, honey-bun; I don’t want your cars.’

‘I’ll keep the house…it’s only fair, seeing as how I’m the one who takes care of it.’

Gwendolyn’s eye twitched. It was like being in the presence of a robot just as it turned sentient. Clive decided it would be the better part of valour – and self-preservation – to allow her some leeway.

‘You can stay here for a few more days, just until you can get your sister to pick you up. But you and your spiders will have to move into the guesthouse.’

‘Certainly.’

Clive was sure Gwendolyn wasn’t crazy enough to try to kill him in his sleep, but he slept in the dead-bolted room where the safe was kept anyway; it would serve two purposes.

When a week had passed without incident, Clive ate breakfast, then made his way outside to mow his prize winning lawn. He had built the lawn mower himself using other gardeners discarded machines. Its width and power – that of seven machines – and its extra-large teeth meant that not only was his ten acre lawn sheered in half the time, but also that stones, garbage, rocks and any other large obstacles that lay in its path were ground into dust in seconds.

Clive had made it a little past five acres when the sky came rushing down to meet him.

When he woke up to a whirring sound, he assumed there was a plane flying overhead. This assumption was dashed when he opened his eyes and attempted to look up.

‘Hello, Darling. Did you have a nice sleep?’

‘You poisoned me?’

‘Only because I knew it wouldn’t do any good to bash your brains in; I learned early on in our marriage that was too soft a target to do any real damage.’

Clive blinked his eyes into focus and saw that Gwendolyn seemed to prefer the title of widow to that of divorcee. She was presently fumbling about, trying to make sense of all the cutting speed settings.

‘You’d better tell me which one’s the fastest if you want this over quickly.’

Clive had ordered them from A to J, in ascending order, and thrown in the letter R for reverse because he thought it practical to have this function right below the fastest cutting speed, in case he ever needed to turn the blades in the opposite direction for reasons of personal safety.

Clive closed his eyes.

‘R.’

‘What does that stand for?’

‘Ritz. I was trying to think of a K name but nothing came to me, then I thought of the time you stomped my Ritz crackers into powder to teach me not to keep treats for myself and I thought it was perfect.’

‘And right you were.’

‘But you must hold down the J and the R at the same time to get it to work. I built that machine well into the dead of night, you see, and I accidentally connected wiring between the two.’

‘Of course you did…nimrod. It is going to be so righteous, laying around in the sun all day, not having to carry your sorry ass.’

She held down the J and the R simultaneously, as instructed.

‘Good b -‘

There was no scream, only the whir and crunch and squelch of steel piercing and grinding flesh and bone and the resultant heat cooking blood. Clive slowly got to his feet and steadied himself before he walked over and pressed the off switch.

All that remained of Gwendolyn was a large pile of deep pink powder. Clive scooped up every last skerick, put it all into a sifter, and spread it across the lawn, whistling a jaunty tune as he went.

The results of his experiment paid dividends less than two weeks later, when Clive’s lush, emerald green outdoor carpet made the cover of Better Homes And Gardens.

‘What’s your secret?’ asked the gushing reporter.

‘Blood and bone,’ said Clive, ‘and a good cutting down once every two weeks.’

Clive fired up the machine and gave the reporter a quick demonstration.

‘Wow,’ said the reporter, ‘that’s amazing…can you hear something?’

‘Hear what?’

‘I could’ve sworn I heard someone moaning just now.’

‘Must be the wind rushing through the grass. This lawn speaks to me all the time.’