These women are crafty

I’m living on pins and needles. I’m looking over my shoulder at every turn. I’m afraid to eat. I’m afraid to take a drink of anything. Danger could lurk anywhere.

Sure, I’m being paranoid, but I think I have every right to. The other day, my wife was watching a television show. She was summoned to another room, but said it would be a while.

“I can’t come until the next commercial. ‘How to Murder Your Husband’ is on,” she announced from the TV room.

Now she had my interest. I lingered within earshot of this program. I don’t know if I have the title exactly right, but it appears that I stumbled into some kind of conspiracy-in-the-making. How could such a show be tolerated? This is a shot against all men everywhere.

But still, it makes me nervous. I make the majority of the coffee around the house, and that very morning, she offered to make a pot. I don’t know if I was imagining it or not, but it sounded like there was an overly nice tone to her voice. Don’t get me wrong. The tone of her voice isn’t usually not nice, but I think this was a little bit different. “Oh dear,” I said. “Don’t go to the trouble. I’ll make it.” I wasn’t going to let her near the coffee, which is within mere yards of a cupboard full of cleaning supplies when minutes earlier she was riveted to such a horrific program.

For days now, I’ve prepared my own meals, unless I know someone else is eating too. I always wait for her to take the first bite. I’m hopeful that since she just watched the show last week that she hasn’t devoted years to taking small amounts of poison herself so her body builds up an immunity to it. I think I’m still safe having her eat everything first.

I’ve also taken to doing some of the cleaning, because I want to know just how much of these various cleaning products that contain poison we have on hand. I’m secretly marking the outsides of every bottle, so I will know if there is four inches of Windex missing.

I just realized, however, that I may be playing right into her trap. Here I am, the man of the house, cooking and cleaning, because I think that there is some conspiracy brewing against me. Maybe she wasn’t trying to kill me after all. She was just trying to get me to do the housework.

These women are crafty, I tell you.