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Suddenly the sky turned black. Not a good sign, Braddock thought, fearing it might clash with his brightly-colored dinner jacket.
“What about Sarah?” his wife, clad in the finest of paper bags, asked him.
“What about Sarah?” Braddock shot back with an admonishing look, figuring that she should have definitely remembered that they had sold their child to a roving band of stockbrokers in order to afford the cab fare.
“Fine!” his wife replied curtly. “Be like that!”
“Be like what?” Braddock snapped back, then remembering that he hadn’t been himself for quite a while now. “Sorry,” he said, more conciliatory, “I’ll change.”
And change he did. He quickly took off his dinner jacket and changed into his overalls, a dull-gray garment, more agreeable with the black color of the sky.
“What about Sarah?” his wife repeated impatiently, causing Braddock to remind her of Sarah’s fate of finding herself in bondage to hardnosed, greedy capitalists. And they both had a hearty laugh.
“Why are you laughing like that?” his wife suddenly asked.
“Laughing … like what?” Braddock replied perplexed, forgetting for a moment that his spouse had been suffering from lifelong bouts of amnesia, which sometimes caused her to assume she actually preferred living the life of warthogs.
“You don’t sound like a warthog at all!” she yelled angrily. “I might have to divorce you!”
“Go right ahead!” Braddock shot back. “And see if you still can get the two-for-one dinner at this restaurant we’ve been standing in line for—for an hour now, I might add!”
“Yes, I heard the food is quite exquisite here,” his wife agreed, while waving at Sarah who was busy waiting hand and foot on the stockbrokers, standing in line as well.
And then they both had a hearty laugh, causing the sky to turn blue once again.
Wolfgang Niesielski was a humor columnist with the Contra Costa Times for many years. He has illustrated books and produced cartoons for the San Jose Mercury News, Philosophy Now, and other publications. He is the author of five books: Bruno Fenster Saves the World: And Still Has Time for Breakfast, Touched by Choi, A Parallel Universe, The Alien in My E-Mail and Other Stories, and Corona Chronicles. He is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Ebele.