The Lasagne Incident

There comes a point in a marriage where you simply run out of things to say.

“What’s the time, Maureen, love? ‘Am getting peckish.” Gordon MacLeish hated his wife. He really could not think of a more repulsive person than his own goddamned wife.

Maureen was slouched on the beige, faux leather, sofa; her sausage like fingers, with nails encrusted with what Gordon could only think to be crumbs of the chocolate muffin she had eaten earlier, picking at the corner of the flaking cushion beneath her. Gordon decided that because she had never played bingo; he couldn’t refer to the revolting flapping skin in place of a bicep on Maureen’s arms as bingo wings.

She’d let her wiry, not so recently dyed brunette, bobbed hair dry so that it floated in curly wisps around her face. This did little to hide the tsunami tide of grey encroaching in on her head. To compensate for the fact that she would not go to the bother of actually styling the fried mess she called her hair, Maureen attempted to radiate youth by smothering her sagging face in thick, pale powder. Gordon didn’t know how to tell her that this just gathered in her wrinkles making them all the more obvious.

Some people refer to wrinkles as laughter lines but Maureen, Gordon thought, never laughs – perhaps hers are frown lines – she’s usually grumpy about something.

“I’ll put the lasagne on now then if you’re hungry.” Maureen grunted as she prepared to hoist herself up from the sofa and slid her hairy toes into a pair of once white slippers. As she spoke her thick, liver spotted neck condensed into several extra chins. She wriggled to the edge of her seat and then swung her huge body forward, gathering enough momentum to lift herself from her seat slightly. With an almighty pull on th...

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... mince disguised with layers of pasta and tomato.

Watching Gordon eat his lasagne was nauseating; he passively heaped forkfuls of the stuff into his huge round face like an infant – more food was squirting out the sides of his lips than he was putting in. White sauce pooled at the corners of his mouth as he ate, causing him to occasionally drag his jumper sleeve across his lips in attempt to remove it.

Maureen pretended not to notice the spillage as Gordon’s plate slipped a little causing a small heap of lasagne to escape its dreadful fate inside his body. Part of the escape party found a home on the Argyll patterned sweater stretched across his swollen belly, and the other, on the ugly cushion that Trish got them as a wedding present. Silently, Gordon turned the soiled cushion over to avoid the effort of fetching a cloth.

Lazy man, thought Maureen, but did nothing.