Michael Malone - Weebly

her lipstick, "I never know which is which."
Coleman Sniffell was at his desk, trying with a pair
of pliers to remove the twist-off top from a bottle of
soda. His thumb was bleeding. He knew the sugar and
artificial coloring inside were going to kill him if he ever
managed to drink any of the garbage. He tore the
clippings off his paper spike and jabbed it through the
bottle top, then sucked. Then he took his sandwich out
of its soggy bag. It was time for his habitual luncheon
reverie. Sniffell used those blank moments when the
brain is forced to fill itself ex nihilo, those confrontations
with emptiness that come to everyone seated on the
toilet without a book, or waiting for a bus or sleep or a
watched pot to boil, to contemplate the murder of his
wife, Ida. Entirely theoretically, of course, merely as a
mental exercise, as some people work chess problems
over a solitary meal. During the past twenty years he
had poisoned her with untraceable salves applied by
South American hunters to the tips of javelins, he had
bumped her out of the head of the Statue of Liberty, he
had shot, bludgeoned, run over, electrocuted, choked,