The attorney set the laptop down on the swing-arm table and moved it to face the old man in the hospital bed. He nodded, and the old man looked into the camera.
“I, F. Mordecai Hauser, being of sound mind and failing body, do here record my last will and testament. My attorney, Danvers Adams, is present and will make himself known when I’m finished.
“Smaller and special bequests have been previously made. This is for my family.
office sounds —
computer whirrs
cat purrs
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. This is all my fault. I never should have suggested a camping vacation. I’m to blame for everything,” Nathan said.
“Even though that’s true,” Emily said, “you don’t need to play the martyr.”
“Just taking all the credit that’s rightfully mine. I thought this would be fun, like the camping trips my family used to take when I was a kid.”
“You’ve told me about them, endlessly, and if I have to hear one more time about how your mother was the key to making them so wonderful, I will never speak to either of you again.”
“Is that a promise?”
“Try me.”
sunset
crescent moon
gestures to Venus
Arnold put a bullet in each of the six chambers.
“Talk about overkill,” he muttered, and made himself chuckle.
He took a last look around his apartment, at the peeling wallpaper in the living room, the leaking faucet dripping on a stack of dishes in the kitchen, the worn carpeting, the old furniture that wouldn’t last long enough to become antique – and it wasn’t his to sell if it did make it that far.
He looked at the stack of bills he had permitted to accumulate on the corner table. They weren’t even all his bills; the previous tenant’s overdue notices were still arriving even after four years.
Arnold looked at the phone. The service had been cut off, but he remembered the last time he had used it. That memory brought him right back to the gun in his hand and the main reason for its being there.
Last words, he thought. I should say something, even though no one is here to listen.
He thought for a couple of moments but nothing interesting came to mind. He finally settled on, “The hell with it,” and raised the gun to his mouth.
The telephone rang.
highway –
my car meets
the storm’s rain shaft
Welby —
So deucedly sorry to do this to you, rushing off like a fox with hounds baying aft, but you know how I am.
You have told me you’ve paid the last of my gambling debts you intend to, and I admit you’ve been more than generous in that area. And you fixed that little misunderstanding between myself and the museum over that damaged painting — which I maintain I was not to be blamed for. Oh, and that jeweler’s concerns over the diamond brooch that somehow slipped into my pocket at his establishment. Along with various incidents at the club. But I sense I’ve come to the end of much of your kindness, and that’s only too easy to understand.
Thus, I am asking for nothing more than your forbearance as I toddle quietly and quickly away from London for some unknown length of time. Oh, and for the £100 I’ve liberated from the company safe for expenses. (No safe is safe from me, ha!)
But, you see, there’s a matter of the young woman I’ve been seeing — I believe I’ve introduced you to Beatrice — and her unborn child, which she insists upon a stack of Bibles is my doing. Now, it may be or it may not be, but she’s talking the most hideous rot about marriage and family. To be frank, it’s deeply unsettling.
tornado warning –
small hail bounces
off the porch roof
But I’m not likely to. There are a great many things I could care less about than I do the ignorant misuse of the phrase couldn’t care less.
Properly used, couldn’t care less means, “I have utterly no interest in the matter at hand and it is not possible for me to be less interested than I am.”
The corrupted version, could care less, is used by people who couldn’t care less about accuracy in language.
If you are of this ilk, then please try to care more. Botching a simple phrase makes you sound ridiculous.