anything. It bit me!" He made certain to emphasize more words than usual in the
sentence. For clarity.
"Right," she said, and skimmed the spatula under the French toast, and plopped
the food onto his plate. "Right. And a little later today I'll have excessive
sex with my microwave oven."
Chris started to reply, caught himself, caught his teeth grinding, caught his
upper ann muscles tensing, caught the words that were left over from last night
starting to bubble up in his throat . . . and went to work on the French toast.
The tablecloth had soaked up the spot of blood.
By Saturday, half his fingers had been stippled. Only the thumbs had been
spared. Smarted like hell.
At first, the first few days, he had considered getting rid of the damned thing,
taking it down to Comp USA and trading up to a 90 MHz Pentium. But by Tuesday,
for some reason, he didn't want to do that. Not only because Hartschorn at the
mail order house was screaming for the assimilated demographics he'd been
analyzing, but because . . . well . . . he'd gotten used to the machine biting
him. It wasn't painful any longer, just smarted like hell. And he seemed to have
developed some sort of relationship with the PC. It wasn't anything he'd
experienced before. A personal relationship with machinery. He had devised a
nickname for his car, of course, a leftover from his teen-age years; and once in
a while he'd called the t.v. remote a dumb bastard when the batteries had gone
low; but neither his electric razor nor the weed-whacker had ever manifested any
interest in establishing a more meaningful relationship with him.
And he had begun to forget things.
"Where did you put that big box of winter clothes from last April?"
Sharilyn asked him on Thursday.
"What box of clothes?"
"That big box. Had Bekins on the side. One of the storage boxes from the move.
Remember, you said you'd find a place for it?"
He had no idea.
"The winter clothes, fer pity's sake!" Sharilyn yelled. Her temper had grown
shorter and shorter with him lately. He was beginning to think they were heading
for bad times, very bad times. Maybe a breakup, maybe a divorce, maybe worse. He
had no idea what worse could mean, but he was feeling a vague disquiet
constantly now, a sense that their time together was being razored to an end.
"I'll look for them," he said, and got up from the computer to go do just that.
She turned away, and he watched her go, and then -- without realizing it -- sat
