Follow me, she whispered

Two AM. I’m sprawled on my sofa, grumpy at time and jealous of the self satisfied bengal cat curled up beside me and twitching rhapsodically in the throes of a dream (probably of eating birds). When did I become so bad at sleep? I remember the time that drifting off was just that. I lay there, did nothing for a few seconds and then it was morning. I’d get up then, (on knees that didn’t complain creakishly) and eat three pop tarts (which magically didn’t make me fat). It’s funny, my experience of getting older is not so much that I can do less, but that doing the same stuff is an exercise in logistics and opportunity cost. Anyway, enough of this. It’s the dead of night - hardly a time for sensibleness. Pfft. Sensibleness.

Instead, I’ve decided I shall begin a new story with you. It is called “The Shoebox of Dead Lady Underpants”. It took me a while to get the title right, actually. I began with “The Shoebox Full of Dead Ladies’ Underpants” but sensed that something was amiss. The added clarity of the possessive apostrophe and the heightened detail of the shoebox being “full" of dead lady knickers somehow blurred the meaning of the tale with extraneous faffery. No no, that won’t do at all. There is a shoebox. What it looks like is unimportant, but in my mind’s eye it is a pale, indifferent red - possibly bordering on salmon. In it there are an unspecified assortment of undergarments once belonging to a woman who is now departed, each of which had at some point been put to the purpose for which they were intended, namely to encase said dead lady’s fragrant (that word is for you, Hilda) nether regions.

That’s where the story begins. No less and no more.

The story is quite simple really. It goes something like this.

One Tuesday morning, with a spring in my step and a barley sugar in my trousers I decided that I would pay a visit to my local thrift store. I took my time, feigning interest in an old set of golf clubs and a cardigan with penguins on it, but I knew why I was there. I was there for a shoebox of dead lady underpants. Finally the store was blissfully clear of hipsters, the simple and the decrepit. I smiled at the mousey, enormously bespectacled lady behind the counter, commented obligingly on the weather. These pleasantries taken care of, I took the plunge.

“Hello! I would like a shoebox of dead lady underpants, please!"

Miss mousey blinked twice and sniffed. She huffed and rearranged the pins and pens. “We don’t purvey the private pants of deceased persons at this establishment”. Oh her haughty chin, her scowl, the primly judgmental adjustment of her spectacles so that they perched high between her watery, lofty eyes. To a lesser judge of the human condition the display might have been convincing.

But for one such as I. Ha. I saw the furtive glimmer, that perverse little gleam, that twisted little glister that clung to her glance like globulous tears hanging from lashes. Oh I knew.
I permitted my smile to melt away. I planted my fists atop her counter and leaned forward, my nose bare inches from the first stray whisps of gray hairs sprouting from her hair line. I spoke slow and soft and deep.

“I would like a shoebox … of dead … lady … underpants."

A clock ticked uneasily on the wall behind us. I heard the old building timbers around and neath us creak and shiver. I watched dust motes spark in the air between us as a decision reached her.

“Follow me,” she whispered.

And that’s it really. Where you go next with it is up to you, but I prefer to leave it right there.