The Inflatable Saviour (part three)
grooveamatic
Posts: 1,374
At the Agency Monday morning, Alfred Monshocky got a call from
a distressed field agent; almost in a panic, the agent took no notice of who he was talking to.
“ Danny, thank God you’re not at lunch! This is Trudeau. Listen: these fuckers down at Shoner’s need-“
Alfred interrupted, “ Trudeau, this isn’t Da-“
“ Listen, Danny: these fuckers down at Shoner’s are barking at me about the Seven-Fives. They say they’re off by point-oh-three per cent. They’re threatening to call Barry. Can you run those numbers super quick for me?”
“ Well, I don’t know…”
“ Danny, I need this, you know? Can you do it, or should I call back and connect with that dim-wit neuter Alvin?”
“ Alvin?”
“ Whatever his name is. The eunuch with the pale face. Who gives a shit?”
“ OK, calm down Trudeau. Tell me exactly what you need.”
“ The seven-fives for Tuesday, down here at Shoner’s. My numbers say it’s a nineteen-point-oh-four, and these fuckers are saying it should be a nineteen-point-oh-one. Christ, they’re mad as bladders!”
“ Hatters?”
“ I don’t wear hats. Are you running the numbers, Danny?”
“ I started running them as soon as I picked up the phone, Trudeau. It looks like your numbers are right, and theirs are wrong. So you can tell those…those fuckers down at Shoner’s where to stick those numbers.”
“ Will do! You’re a lifesaver, Danny! Best stats guy we’ve got.”
“ Thanks a lot, Trudeau.”
“ Talk to ya later, Danny.”
“ Goodbye, Trudeau.”
With a light sigh, Alfred placed the phone in it’s cradle and slid his chair back from his desk. Only the second call of the day, and, he thought, it would probably not get any more hectic than that. If Barry had been called in on that, things could have gotten ugly. He found himself wishing he had given Trudeau the right numbers. The scene down at Shoner’s was only going to get more confusing. He smiled despite himself.
Ginger-Ale, he said to himself. He felt like treating himself to a Ginger-Ale. He was certain that the decades of housewife lore about the soothing effects of Ginger-Ale on the digestive system were absolutely true; currently his stomach was flying in loops. “Ginger-Ale” he now said aloud, content in his assertion that it was the most phonetically pleasing soda, along with it’s stomach-calming lure.
Alfred strode down the hall outside his office to the soda machine, and inserted the exact change into the slot. He tapped the Canada Dry button, listened to the inner workings dropping his selection.
“ Hey, Al ol’ boy!”
“ Oh, hey Danny. How was the smoke break?”
“ Oh, you know-not long enough. Any excitement while I was gone?”
“ Nope. Quiet as a funeral in here.”
“ It sure is. Al, I’ve never seen you get a soda at work before. Not once.”
“ Ginger-Ale, Danny. I love these fuckers.”
The re-arranging started simply enough. The chaise lounge was getting in Alfred’s way any time he walked from the bathroom to the den. It wasn’t very much in his way; he would simply brush his lower thigh against one of it’s arms, but he found it annoying.
Alfred started by moving his recliner and his couch closer together, so he could squeeze the chaise between the recliner and the wall. Even with the chair and couch flush against one another, he was still short a foot. He tried angling all the different furniture pieces every way imaginable. It just wouldn’t work.
The phone kept ringing, and Alfred kept not answering it.
Finally he settled on taking the recliner into the dining room. Until I can figure something else out, he said to himself. Besides, there might come a time when such a set-up would come in handy, he thought.
But the recliner wouldn’t fit through the doorway leading into the dining room. He tried it sitting straight up first, and it was obvious that the recliner was two inches wider than the doorway. Then he tried it on it’s side, squeezing it laterally through the doorway as one might move a T-Square through an open cruise-ship portal. Still the dimensions didn’t match up. The chair was simply too big. He was crawling up over the top of the chair into the dining room and pulling on it, then clambering back over into the living room and pushing, up and over and over and back, to no avail.
He stood, hands on hips, glaring at the chair as if it were a naughty child. And then suddenly Alfred Monshocky siezed the recliner, unwedged it from the doorway, and pulled it across the living room and out the front door. He didn’t ease it down the front step; it banged the concrete landing and somewhere in the reclining mechanism, a spring broke loose with a thwaaang. He kept on pulling it straight out onto his lawn, making sure it was perfectly centered on his property-and facing the road-and he went back inside.
Now the chaise lounge and the couch could fit very nicely beside one another. It looked perfect, he thought. It was certainly cozy.
Alfred looked out his giant front bay window at the lonely recliner in the middle of his yard and smiled. He almost laughed out loud. Sitting gently down on the chaise, he said, “It certainly is cozy.”
The phone kept ringing, and Alfred kept not answering it.
Pushing his thoughts aside, Alfred looked at the wall-mounted Seth Thomas above the fake fireplace. He’d been engulfed in his own stream-of-consciousness for over two hours. It had seemed like only ten minutes. This chaise lounge, Alfred thought, is a time machine.
He suddenly realized the phone was ringing. It shocked him more than it should have. His shoulders arched up like the spine of a cat who has been threatened. After a second of hesitation, Alfred dashed to the wall-mounted kitchen phone.
“ Hello, Alfred Monshocky.”
“ Al, for Chrissake, where’ve you been?”
“ Excuse me?”
“ Al, it’s Barry. I’ve been trying to call you all night!”
“ Oh my. Hello Barry. I was gardening.”
“ At night, Al?”
“ Well…I’ve got these Moonflowers, see…?”
“ Whatever, Al. I don’t really care. There was a terrible mess down at Shoner’s today, and they’re threatening to go to a different agency. I need your input on this.”
“ Whatever I can do to help, Barry.”
“ OK, here’s the skinny: Trudeau is the agent with them. You know that, right, Al? OK. Trudeau says that Shoner’s people accused our numbers of being off, and that he was pretty sure that our numbers were right. So he called in to you guys, and he talked to Danny. He says Danny ran the digits, and he confirmed that our numbers were spot-on, and the Shoner’s guys were off somehow. And when Trudeau went and told the Shoner’s people that, they said OK, whatever, and started using our numbers. Turns out our numbers were wrong.”
“ Uh-huh.”
“ Is that possible, Al?”
“ You just told me that it happened.”
“ Al, do you know what happened after Shoner’s plugged our numbers into their system?”
Alfred had somehow managed to wrap his entire hand into a ball of telephone cord. He was currently puzzling at it, unsure if it might actually be stuck in it. “What happened, Barry?”
“All damn hell broke loose, Al, that’s what happened! They were turning out malformed products,their assembly line was like that episode of ‘Laverne and Shirley-“
“ You mean ‘I Love Lucy’?”
“ Now’s not the time for bullshit, Al. What I’m telling you is, Shoner’s lost a good deal of money because of us today, Al, and either we’re gonna have to cover it, or we lose their account. Now, what I want to ask you is, how could that have happened?”
Alfred had managed only to further entangle his hand. He allowed a worried look to cross his face. “ I guess Danny’s numbers must have been off, too.”
“ Al, you know damned well that’s impossible. That’s why we even have you guys at all-your numbers come right out of the company database. The only way for those numbers to be off is…well, there isn’t a way for those numbers to be off. Al, were you in the office with Danny when he talked to Trudeau?”
“ Not that I recall. What time did it happen?”
“ It’s logged as coming in at 9:37. Were you there?”
Alfred had managed to get half his hand free of the cord, but in the process, it had lassoed around his leg twice. He stood on the other leg and wagged the tangled one around in semi-circles, attempting to use centrifugal force to unlasso the cord. “ Nope, Barry. I went to the soda machine around 9:30, and then went straight to the restroom. Danny wasn’t on the phone when I got back.”
“ And he didn’t mention a call from Trudeau?”
“ Nope. As a matter of fact, Barry, Danny said it had been quiet as a funeral while I had been gone.”
“ Al, listen now, can I trust you?”
“ Of course Barry. How do you mean?”
“ I want to level with you about this Shoner mess, and I want you not say anything to Danny about it. Can I trust you that way?”
Alfred had resigned himself to the fact that he was tangled in the cord. He might even have to rip the phone off the wall later, in order to get out. “ Sure, Barry. Danny and I don’t talk much, anyway.”
“ Al, would Danny have any reason to lie to Trudeau about those numbers?”
“ Are you serious, Barry?”
“ Doesn’t it strike you as the only possibility, Al?”
“ Well…if you put it that way, Barry. I suppose I hadn’t thought about it. But now, I do remember once, I heard Trudeau call Danny a neuter. Maybe Danny was mad about that still.”
“ There was tension between them? I knew it! And when was this?”
“ Oh, a while ago.”
“ Was that the extent of it? Was there ever any more confrontation between them?”
“ Actually, Barry, I think he called him a ‘dim-wit neuter’…those were his words exactly.”
“ And so Danny might have lied about the numbers, Al?”
“ I think Danny might have lied about those numbers, Barry.”
After ripping his phone off the wall, Alfred returned to the chaise lounge. It might be nice to sleep on it tonight, just for kicks, he thought. He trotted down the hall to his linen closet. He hadn’t needed to use any of the spare linen for years; houseguests were few, and he washed his usual linen every two weeks.
After pulling some sheets off the shelf, his eye caught the colorful box tucked into a corner. The box with cracked-open language written on it and exaggerated body parts, mouths forever agape.
“ The inflatable woman,” Alfred whispered, as he dragged the box out into the hall, and sat down Indian-style to inspect it.
Twenty minutes later, she was sitting beside him on the chaise lounge, staring blankly into the fake fire. Alfred could not suppress his grin. Danny had been right, of course. The thing was a riot. Just glancing at it made Alfred giddy. He found himself wishing that the chaise was an actual time machine, and him and his woman could go back in time to make the office party happen as scheduled. Now he could see just how humorous it would have been to put her in Barry’s office. Everyone would have laughed about it, and told stories until the next office party.
It was very late at night; Alfred had now decided to not sleep at all. He couldn’t call off work the next day, not after his conversation with Barry tonight. He’d be expected to be there. But he could drink lots of coffee, and maybe stop off at the drug store on the way and pick up a bottle of those energy pills he’d read so much about. He was having too much fun to go to sleep.
Alfred squared about on the chaise so he was directly facing the woman. He leaned in close and smelled her, his nostrils flaring like dime-sized deployed parachutes. “ Like a new raincoat. What I mean to say is, you smell like a new raincoat.” He leaned back and laughed out loud. “ I don’t mean to laugh at you, dear, but you’re just so…naked!” Again he burst into laughter, this time much louder and longer than the first time. He cackled the way one might after seeing a child fall off a bicycle, or while cleaning blood stains off a white carpet. “ What you need is some clothes!”
And off he went trotting up the stairs to his bedroom. What size is she? He thought, and then immediately laughed again. I don’t know anything about women’s sizes…even if I had any women’s clothing! He realized that-probably more than ever in his life before-he was entertaining himself.
Alfred showed up downstairs with an armload of his own clothing. Long-sleeved shirts that had gone out of fashion a decade ago, a few pajama bottoms that had become too worn for his liking, a robe his mother had given him that he felt did not fit his home’s color scheme, and some knee-high black socks.
“ Hello dear. Wanna play fashion show?”
Alfred found right away that it was difficult to put clothes on an inflated woman. The slightest pressure he applied led to her bending in any number of unpredictable (although often humorous) directions. The socks were the most difficult. The woman’s feet would entirely collapse under the socks. The elastic was too taut. Alfred got his scissors and cut the socks an inch down the middle, and that seemed to work. The shirts weren’t so hard, except that he found it hard to button them while laughing so hard.
Finally she was all dressed, and Alfred-for the first time that night-felt very tired. One look at the Seth Thomas, though, brought him awake with a start. He had to be at work in two hours. He had more than enough time (his commute took almost twenty minutes) but he most assuredly couldn’t sleep at all now. I’d never wake up in time. In time, I wouldn’t wake up, he thought, and laughed so hard, he had to go to the bathroom.
Sitting the woman back on the chaise, Alfred decided that dressing her up like a man- that dressing her up like him-wasn’t quite funny enough.
“ It doesn’t do justice to her,” he said aloud, and began searching the house for anything that might possibly do justice to the woman on the chaise lounge.
From the garage he brought his winter parka. Immediately he saw that putting that on the woman would be more silly than funny, and not in the least becoming to her. Alfred threw the parka behind the sofa, and continued his search. Back to the bedroom he went, his head swivelling to and fro like a confused poodle. Nothing he owned was right for her; even taking into account that it had to be men’s clothing, not a single article leaped out at Alfred as the thing for her. Unconventional, Alfred thought, she’s unconventional, so she’ll need something unconventional. Now he scanned the room anew. Something overstated.
His gaze settled first upon the top of the old television he still kept in his bedroom but barely ever watched. It was the set of antannas on top of the TV that intrigued him. He could remember folks calling them bunny-ears, back when folks used to need to pull signals in from the air to get their local news. Bunny-ears, he thought, for a bunny!
a distressed field agent; almost in a panic, the agent took no notice of who he was talking to.
“ Danny, thank God you’re not at lunch! This is Trudeau. Listen: these fuckers down at Shoner’s need-“
Alfred interrupted, “ Trudeau, this isn’t Da-“
“ Listen, Danny: these fuckers down at Shoner’s are barking at me about the Seven-Fives. They say they’re off by point-oh-three per cent. They’re threatening to call Barry. Can you run those numbers super quick for me?”
“ Well, I don’t know…”
“ Danny, I need this, you know? Can you do it, or should I call back and connect with that dim-wit neuter Alvin?”
“ Alvin?”
“ Whatever his name is. The eunuch with the pale face. Who gives a shit?”
“ OK, calm down Trudeau. Tell me exactly what you need.”
“ The seven-fives for Tuesday, down here at Shoner’s. My numbers say it’s a nineteen-point-oh-four, and these fuckers are saying it should be a nineteen-point-oh-one. Christ, they’re mad as bladders!”
“ Hatters?”
“ I don’t wear hats. Are you running the numbers, Danny?”
“ I started running them as soon as I picked up the phone, Trudeau. It looks like your numbers are right, and theirs are wrong. So you can tell those…those fuckers down at Shoner’s where to stick those numbers.”
“ Will do! You’re a lifesaver, Danny! Best stats guy we’ve got.”
“ Thanks a lot, Trudeau.”
“ Talk to ya later, Danny.”
“ Goodbye, Trudeau.”
With a light sigh, Alfred placed the phone in it’s cradle and slid his chair back from his desk. Only the second call of the day, and, he thought, it would probably not get any more hectic than that. If Barry had been called in on that, things could have gotten ugly. He found himself wishing he had given Trudeau the right numbers. The scene down at Shoner’s was only going to get more confusing. He smiled despite himself.
Ginger-Ale, he said to himself. He felt like treating himself to a Ginger-Ale. He was certain that the decades of housewife lore about the soothing effects of Ginger-Ale on the digestive system were absolutely true; currently his stomach was flying in loops. “Ginger-Ale” he now said aloud, content in his assertion that it was the most phonetically pleasing soda, along with it’s stomach-calming lure.
Alfred strode down the hall outside his office to the soda machine, and inserted the exact change into the slot. He tapped the Canada Dry button, listened to the inner workings dropping his selection.
“ Hey, Al ol’ boy!”
“ Oh, hey Danny. How was the smoke break?”
“ Oh, you know-not long enough. Any excitement while I was gone?”
“ Nope. Quiet as a funeral in here.”
“ It sure is. Al, I’ve never seen you get a soda at work before. Not once.”
“ Ginger-Ale, Danny. I love these fuckers.”
The re-arranging started simply enough. The chaise lounge was getting in Alfred’s way any time he walked from the bathroom to the den. It wasn’t very much in his way; he would simply brush his lower thigh against one of it’s arms, but he found it annoying.
Alfred started by moving his recliner and his couch closer together, so he could squeeze the chaise between the recliner and the wall. Even with the chair and couch flush against one another, he was still short a foot. He tried angling all the different furniture pieces every way imaginable. It just wouldn’t work.
The phone kept ringing, and Alfred kept not answering it.
Finally he settled on taking the recliner into the dining room. Until I can figure something else out, he said to himself. Besides, there might come a time when such a set-up would come in handy, he thought.
But the recliner wouldn’t fit through the doorway leading into the dining room. He tried it sitting straight up first, and it was obvious that the recliner was two inches wider than the doorway. Then he tried it on it’s side, squeezing it laterally through the doorway as one might move a T-Square through an open cruise-ship portal. Still the dimensions didn’t match up. The chair was simply too big. He was crawling up over the top of the chair into the dining room and pulling on it, then clambering back over into the living room and pushing, up and over and over and back, to no avail.
He stood, hands on hips, glaring at the chair as if it were a naughty child. And then suddenly Alfred Monshocky siezed the recliner, unwedged it from the doorway, and pulled it across the living room and out the front door. He didn’t ease it down the front step; it banged the concrete landing and somewhere in the reclining mechanism, a spring broke loose with a thwaaang. He kept on pulling it straight out onto his lawn, making sure it was perfectly centered on his property-and facing the road-and he went back inside.
Now the chaise lounge and the couch could fit very nicely beside one another. It looked perfect, he thought. It was certainly cozy.
Alfred looked out his giant front bay window at the lonely recliner in the middle of his yard and smiled. He almost laughed out loud. Sitting gently down on the chaise, he said, “It certainly is cozy.”
The phone kept ringing, and Alfred kept not answering it.
Pushing his thoughts aside, Alfred looked at the wall-mounted Seth Thomas above the fake fireplace. He’d been engulfed in his own stream-of-consciousness for over two hours. It had seemed like only ten minutes. This chaise lounge, Alfred thought, is a time machine.
He suddenly realized the phone was ringing. It shocked him more than it should have. His shoulders arched up like the spine of a cat who has been threatened. After a second of hesitation, Alfred dashed to the wall-mounted kitchen phone.
“ Hello, Alfred Monshocky.”
“ Al, for Chrissake, where’ve you been?”
“ Excuse me?”
“ Al, it’s Barry. I’ve been trying to call you all night!”
“ Oh my. Hello Barry. I was gardening.”
“ At night, Al?”
“ Well…I’ve got these Moonflowers, see…?”
“ Whatever, Al. I don’t really care. There was a terrible mess down at Shoner’s today, and they’re threatening to go to a different agency. I need your input on this.”
“ Whatever I can do to help, Barry.”
“ OK, here’s the skinny: Trudeau is the agent with them. You know that, right, Al? OK. Trudeau says that Shoner’s people accused our numbers of being off, and that he was pretty sure that our numbers were right. So he called in to you guys, and he talked to Danny. He says Danny ran the digits, and he confirmed that our numbers were spot-on, and the Shoner’s guys were off somehow. And when Trudeau went and told the Shoner’s people that, they said OK, whatever, and started using our numbers. Turns out our numbers were wrong.”
“ Uh-huh.”
“ Is that possible, Al?”
“ You just told me that it happened.”
“ Al, do you know what happened after Shoner’s plugged our numbers into their system?”
Alfred had somehow managed to wrap his entire hand into a ball of telephone cord. He was currently puzzling at it, unsure if it might actually be stuck in it. “What happened, Barry?”
“All damn hell broke loose, Al, that’s what happened! They were turning out malformed products,their assembly line was like that episode of ‘Laverne and Shirley-“
“ You mean ‘I Love Lucy’?”
“ Now’s not the time for bullshit, Al. What I’m telling you is, Shoner’s lost a good deal of money because of us today, Al, and either we’re gonna have to cover it, or we lose their account. Now, what I want to ask you is, how could that have happened?”
Alfred had managed only to further entangle his hand. He allowed a worried look to cross his face. “ I guess Danny’s numbers must have been off, too.”
“ Al, you know damned well that’s impossible. That’s why we even have you guys at all-your numbers come right out of the company database. The only way for those numbers to be off is…well, there isn’t a way for those numbers to be off. Al, were you in the office with Danny when he talked to Trudeau?”
“ Not that I recall. What time did it happen?”
“ It’s logged as coming in at 9:37. Were you there?”
Alfred had managed to get half his hand free of the cord, but in the process, it had lassoed around his leg twice. He stood on the other leg and wagged the tangled one around in semi-circles, attempting to use centrifugal force to unlasso the cord. “ Nope, Barry. I went to the soda machine around 9:30, and then went straight to the restroom. Danny wasn’t on the phone when I got back.”
“ And he didn’t mention a call from Trudeau?”
“ Nope. As a matter of fact, Barry, Danny said it had been quiet as a funeral while I had been gone.”
“ Al, listen now, can I trust you?”
“ Of course Barry. How do you mean?”
“ I want to level with you about this Shoner mess, and I want you not say anything to Danny about it. Can I trust you that way?”
Alfred had resigned himself to the fact that he was tangled in the cord. He might even have to rip the phone off the wall later, in order to get out. “ Sure, Barry. Danny and I don’t talk much, anyway.”
“ Al, would Danny have any reason to lie to Trudeau about those numbers?”
“ Are you serious, Barry?”
“ Doesn’t it strike you as the only possibility, Al?”
“ Well…if you put it that way, Barry. I suppose I hadn’t thought about it. But now, I do remember once, I heard Trudeau call Danny a neuter. Maybe Danny was mad about that still.”
“ There was tension between them? I knew it! And when was this?”
“ Oh, a while ago.”
“ Was that the extent of it? Was there ever any more confrontation between them?”
“ Actually, Barry, I think he called him a ‘dim-wit neuter’…those were his words exactly.”
“ And so Danny might have lied about the numbers, Al?”
“ I think Danny might have lied about those numbers, Barry.”
After ripping his phone off the wall, Alfred returned to the chaise lounge. It might be nice to sleep on it tonight, just for kicks, he thought. He trotted down the hall to his linen closet. He hadn’t needed to use any of the spare linen for years; houseguests were few, and he washed his usual linen every two weeks.
After pulling some sheets off the shelf, his eye caught the colorful box tucked into a corner. The box with cracked-open language written on it and exaggerated body parts, mouths forever agape.
“ The inflatable woman,” Alfred whispered, as he dragged the box out into the hall, and sat down Indian-style to inspect it.
Twenty minutes later, she was sitting beside him on the chaise lounge, staring blankly into the fake fire. Alfred could not suppress his grin. Danny had been right, of course. The thing was a riot. Just glancing at it made Alfred giddy. He found himself wishing that the chaise was an actual time machine, and him and his woman could go back in time to make the office party happen as scheduled. Now he could see just how humorous it would have been to put her in Barry’s office. Everyone would have laughed about it, and told stories until the next office party.
It was very late at night; Alfred had now decided to not sleep at all. He couldn’t call off work the next day, not after his conversation with Barry tonight. He’d be expected to be there. But he could drink lots of coffee, and maybe stop off at the drug store on the way and pick up a bottle of those energy pills he’d read so much about. He was having too much fun to go to sleep.
Alfred squared about on the chaise so he was directly facing the woman. He leaned in close and smelled her, his nostrils flaring like dime-sized deployed parachutes. “ Like a new raincoat. What I mean to say is, you smell like a new raincoat.” He leaned back and laughed out loud. “ I don’t mean to laugh at you, dear, but you’re just so…naked!” Again he burst into laughter, this time much louder and longer than the first time. He cackled the way one might after seeing a child fall off a bicycle, or while cleaning blood stains off a white carpet. “ What you need is some clothes!”
And off he went trotting up the stairs to his bedroom. What size is she? He thought, and then immediately laughed again. I don’t know anything about women’s sizes…even if I had any women’s clothing! He realized that-probably more than ever in his life before-he was entertaining himself.
Alfred showed up downstairs with an armload of his own clothing. Long-sleeved shirts that had gone out of fashion a decade ago, a few pajama bottoms that had become too worn for his liking, a robe his mother had given him that he felt did not fit his home’s color scheme, and some knee-high black socks.
“ Hello dear. Wanna play fashion show?”
Alfred found right away that it was difficult to put clothes on an inflated woman. The slightest pressure he applied led to her bending in any number of unpredictable (although often humorous) directions. The socks were the most difficult. The woman’s feet would entirely collapse under the socks. The elastic was too taut. Alfred got his scissors and cut the socks an inch down the middle, and that seemed to work. The shirts weren’t so hard, except that he found it hard to button them while laughing so hard.
Finally she was all dressed, and Alfred-for the first time that night-felt very tired. One look at the Seth Thomas, though, brought him awake with a start. He had to be at work in two hours. He had more than enough time (his commute took almost twenty minutes) but he most assuredly couldn’t sleep at all now. I’d never wake up in time. In time, I wouldn’t wake up, he thought, and laughed so hard, he had to go to the bathroom.
Sitting the woman back on the chaise, Alfred decided that dressing her up like a man- that dressing her up like him-wasn’t quite funny enough.
“ It doesn’t do justice to her,” he said aloud, and began searching the house for anything that might possibly do justice to the woman on the chaise lounge.
From the garage he brought his winter parka. Immediately he saw that putting that on the woman would be more silly than funny, and not in the least becoming to her. Alfred threw the parka behind the sofa, and continued his search. Back to the bedroom he went, his head swivelling to and fro like a confused poodle. Nothing he owned was right for her; even taking into account that it had to be men’s clothing, not a single article leaped out at Alfred as the thing for her. Unconventional, Alfred thought, she’s unconventional, so she’ll need something unconventional. Now he scanned the room anew. Something overstated.
His gaze settled first upon the top of the old television he still kept in his bedroom but barely ever watched. It was the set of antannas on top of the TV that intrigued him. He could remember folks calling them bunny-ears, back when folks used to need to pull signals in from the air to get their local news. Bunny-ears, he thought, for a bunny!
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