Mark, There's a Beagle in My Bedroom!



  Mark, There’s A Beagle In My Bedroom!

  By Michael Ciardi

  Fiction

  Published by Lunar Prose Books

  [email protected]

  In E-Book Form

  Cover Design by Joleene Naylor

  Copyright 2014 Michael Ciardi

  Chapter 1

  When Kip Hinkle was just a kid, finding an upgrade meant nothing more than pedaling up a hill on his bicycle. But he wasn’t nearly as gullible or gung-ho nowadays. Kip had already plucked enough grizzled hairs from his scalp to realize that most adults were as disposable as soiled diapers. His induction into this sobering realm of shame occurred on the day before his fifteenth wedding anniversary. He long considered his wife, Peg, a top-drawer centerpiece in the bureau of womanhood. Why she ever accepted a marriage proposal from a dull furniture salesman with a bedpost’s physique and receding hairline startled her family as much as it did his own. But Kip’s shadow of inferiority faded over time because Peg assured him that he was the only man in town who ever made her laugh hysterically enough to trigger incontinence.

  “You’re a real pisser,” she often told him.

  Kip took it as a compliment.

  As it stood on the afternoon in question, Kip arranged to leave his job early at Bed Mania in order to surprise Peg at home. She rarely expected him to arrive before six on any given weekday, particularly on a Friday. He anticipated her delight after ambling into the house with a spray of supermarket roses in tow. Peg usually welcomed such cliché romantic miens, although he produced them far less frequently than she preferred. Nevertheless, he still had time to amend for the venial complacencies that tarnished every chivalrous knight’s armor on occasion. Or at least that’s how he rationalized his lackluster behavior until this moment. A rhythmic noise emanating from the master bedroom, however, put a sizable chink in Sir Kip’s courtly gesture.

  Kip remembered his father telling him that old houses typically settled, and this notion consequently explained the creaking sounds in his childhood bedroom’s floorboards every night until he left for college. Of course, the elder Hinkle’s expertise in carpentry only went as far as Kip’s former address. Since Kip presently lived in a townhouse no more than five years old, his father’s theory on wood expansion took on an entirely different meaning.

  Kip peddled quite a few mattresses in his forty-plus years, and this loomed as a reminder that they’re primarily bought for two activities. Peg never slept when the sun was shining, and the last cloud spotted overhead was three days ago. Certain scenarios in life seemed too surreal, and while Kip slumped in the foyer of his house listening to his wife chortle with more rapture than a pack of scavenging hyenas, he surmised that she was already making efficient use of her afternoon off from work. Kip dropped the roses on the flagstone and waited for the bed’s frame to stop squeaking.

  Men never really knew how to cope with such a situation until it actually happened. Some might’ve envisioned a spiteful feat where they singlehandedly ousted the adulterer and her lover in a harangue of justifiable rage. But the truth was decidedly less dramatic. As Kip plodded the steps leading up toward the master bedroom, he realized that his next act was a crapshoot of the mind. Before inching down the corridor, he heard the bathroom’s shower beating alternately against skin and porcelain. This in itself served as an irrefutable marker of his wife’s post-carnal habits; she always rinsed off immediately after sex, almost as if she was purging herself from the musky deed. Until today, Kip could’ve lived with that sort of quirkiness from a woman.

  But, as it was with most scorned partners, Kip couldn’t overlook the handiwork of another man filling in for him at home while he was at work. He thought about barging into the room and slinging incendiary insults, but not at the risk of fueling an already combustible atmosphere. Instead, he peeled open the door as if descending into the pages of a nightmarish book, peering with both contempt and curiosity at the unclothed antagonist in his bed.

  Because Peg still washed off the residue of lust in the adjacent bathroom, she was unaware of her husband’s untimely intrusion. Her lover, who Kip mercifully didn’t recognize, was not more than twenty-two, with a hairless, muscled chest and cocksure grin puffing out his flushed cheeks. His smile lasted no more than a nanosecond after he noticed Kip leering at him. Rather than scold him for this violation of human decency, Kip simply placed his index finger across his lips and motioned for the young man to remove his ass from his bed as unobtrusively as possible. The boy obliged, and promptly gathered his crumpled brown uniform and shoes from the floor.

  “I…I didn’t know she was married,” he groveled. Perhaps this was the only sensible response he could’ve manufactured under the circumstances.

  “Her wedding ring didn’t give you a clue?” Kip asked.

  “What ring? I didn’t see any ring on her finger.”

  Kip didn’t bother to launch into a prolonged interrogation. He already shifted his scrutiny to the uniform crumpled in the liar’s hands. “You work for U.P.S.,” Kip said. “You’ve delivered packages to this address before today. Am I right?”

  “Yeah, I guess once or twice.”

  “Front door or back?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Recovery time. Consider this your last C.O.D. to my wife. Understood?”

  “But I didn’t bring her a C.O.D.”

  “Then what are you doing with your pants off?”

  The boy nodded his chin like an obedient pup and streaked down the corridor as if his bare ass was set aflame. Kip centered his attention toward the bed, and decided that he wanted to furnish Peg with a surprise of his own after all. Luckily, his wife took long showers. Apparently, deceit didn’t scrub off easily. When the water from the bathroom finally dribbled to a halt, Kip substituted himself as Peg’s buff lover beneath the sheets of their bed.

  “Get ready for round two, big boy,” she cooed from the bathroom. Lately, Kip hadn’t heard such a bouncy timbre spring from Peg’s voice unless it had dollar signs affixed to the end of it. She emerged from the shower’s mist with all the natural splendor of Eve frolicking through Eden’s verdure. The temptress’s blonde hair fell in damp strands at her shoulders, and her skin looked as pink as an albino rat’s nose as she postured in the archway. After she glanced at exactly who greeted her in bed, however, it seemed as if she had munched a bit too far into the worm of the proverbial Apple.

  “Hi, honey. I’m home,” Kip said.

  He didn’t need to say anything else. Peg Hinkle, the woman he adored and remained faithful to for the better portion of his adult life, had already found her upgrade.

  Chapter 2