Topographia (top-o-graf’-i-a): Description of a place. A kind of enargia [: {en-ar’-gi-a} generic name for a group of figures aiming at vivid, lively description].
I was alone. The house was empty. It was quiet. I sat there in my bathrobe and thought about what had happened, trying to figure out why it had happened. Well, I actually knew. After 20 years of being happily married, my wife had become insane. She thought I was a menace to humanity—that I made bombs, spread diseases and drowned kittens in the pond behind our house. She became fixated on killing me. I, like a fool, let her get away with her attempts.
One afternoon I was sitting in my easy chair. I had just given our dog Mike a bubble bath in the upstairs bathroom. He had followed me back downstairs and was trying to hump my leg. I kept kicking him off with my free foot. He was like a jackhammer from hell. Then, there was a great big “boom.” My wife had shot Mike with my deer hunting gun. It was loaded with .12 gauge slugs. Mike died instantly—a quarter-sized hole in his back. My wife dropped the gun to the floor. She said “I missed.” I thought nothing of it at the time. She was always complaining about Mike, so I thought she was reacting to her irritation and carrying out her anger. Killing Mike was a little extreme, but I could live with it.
About two weeks later I was taking a bath. I had the bathroom door locked. I liked privacy when I took a bath. Suddenly, there was a loud banging on the bathroom door. “Let me in! Let me in right now!” she yelled as she pounded. I said “No. Leave me alone.” She said, “Ok fat ass, I’ll be right back.” She was gone for about two minutes. I heard her outside the door starting my chainsaw. She sawed a hole in the door big enough to walk through. Then she picked up a space heater off the floor and threw it in the tub. Nothing happened. The space heater wasn’t plugged in. Just as I was wondering why she didn’t go after me with the chainsaw, she picked it up but couldn’t get it started.
I should’ve had her arrested, but instead, I used my health insurance to put her into therapy. I didn’t want to send all our happy years of marriage down the drain. The first thing the psychologist told me was that my wife is a homicidal maniac, and eventually, she would succeed in murdering me. “She hates you. Maybe if we could figure why, we could help her,” he said. I was clueless. Sure, I played jokes on her and teased, but that shouldn’t induce homicidal urges toward me. For example, one time I told her that her mother had burned alive in a train crash. The look on her face was priceless. She stopped sobbing when I told her it was a joke. No harm done.
Anyway, one evening I was watching TV and she crawled up behind my chair and pulled a plastic bag over my head. It was one of those cheap eco-friendly bags and I was able to poke a hole in it over my mouth. That did it. I called the police. She was arrested, tried, and convicted of attempted first degree murder.
Now, she has a guaranteed life residence for life—out in the high desert with coyotes and cactus and wind. Where the armadillos play and the sun shines all day and the prairie dogs dig holes all over the place.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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