Contact Author C. F. Button

Despite the historic rise in fuel prices and transportation fares, my family recently gathered to pay due respect to the family matriarch, now 90 years young. Luckily, I had gotten over my nasty chest cold before going, and my dear wife has an immune system which gives her powers akin to quack-grass resisting puny herbicides.

However, by day three of our visit, the sunshine state representatives of the family showed up with Mom’s granddaughter. All members of that family branch either sounded like terminal emphysema patients or had severe nasal drip. How could they not come to granny’s 90th birthday party?

On the day we returned, my ears would no longer pop when the airplane descended, a bad sign indeed. Miserable, slimy, cold! We called back to Mom, only to confirm that she had also received the curse, as had my sister and brother-in-law. All lay like miserable sloths in a cage, unable to expend the energy to go outside.

I spent a week in isolation, unwilling to pass this Florida import to my friends, but finally with ear still under pressure, went out to the doctor for antibiotics . A second week passed. The infection grudgingly released me, and I prepared to resume normal life.

Then I noticed my wife dosing herself repeatedly with her herbalist magic, only to succumb to the coughing misery. No amount of magic or faith can deny the reality of evolution when it can enable a virus to penetrate the code of her combination lock. To think this evil bit of germ plasm and DNA is now loose in Oregon is frightening, but how could we not attend that family obligation?

Thus the next tragic flu virus, or bacteria will spread throughout the earth. But no, that is not how the world ends. No, my wife just invented the cure. Ah, yes! The cure! A jalapeño chowder, so spicy, the term “volcanic” is an understatement. And I, having the misfortune of having been raised in a Midwestern household with bland eating habits, must also undergo this cure, because only fools do not eat what is put before them by the hand of a willing spouse. Sweat running from my scalp to soak my shirt. My eyeballs are sweating! Even she admits it is a little spicy, going back to get a second helping.

Oh, but wait for tomorrow. Apocalypse!

Clair Button is the author of the Thomas Kreuger Mystery Series, and occasionally makes attempts at humor.

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Here are the links back to my primary website:
Snakeweed Press Home Page" "Cow Cookies" "Quicksand Plot" "Coyote Staircase

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