Carlos and the Comedic Comment
by Eli Evans
Carlos Gaslamp was sleeping rump-to-rump with his dog Schneeballs, which is precisely the way canines in a pack sleep in the wild in order to collaboratively keep watch for the dangerous predators that at any moment are liable to sneak up from any given direction. One might presume that such a nocturnal strategy would have been altogether unnecessary in Gaslamp’s quiet suburban home, at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac in a quiet suburban neighborhood, but soon enough a predator indeed approached the bed where the two members of the interspecies pair warily snoozed away, each with one eye half-open.
“Mayday!” cried Gaslamp, discerning its menacing shadow in the doorway. “Woof! Woof! Woof!!”
But it was merely his wife, and upon making this discovery Gaslamp determined not only that everything was basically copacetic but that he’d furthermore been grossly overestimating the danger he and Schneeballs were in, and, encouraging his furry companion to do the same, therein drifted into a profound and unbothered slumber, which turned out to be a bad idea because while he dreamed of ransacking a certain local thrift shop with a group of people he hadn’t seen since his days in the world of professional secondhand thievery, his wife went and gobbled him up like some kind of perverted maniac. Ultimately, though, the joke was on her: while Gaslamp was nothing more than meat at that point, owing to his rather unorthodox diet he was a very hard-to-digest variety of meat.
Oh, I’m only kidding. Gaslamp’s wife may have been plenty of things, but one thing she definitely was not was a cannibal – unless, that is, she happened to be stranded on a high mountain pass in the dead of winter with a group of other ill-fated explorers, in which case she could cannibalize with the best of them. At the moment in question, however, she and Gaslamp were far from any high mountain passes, and what actually happened was that, realizing he had mistaken her for a malicious invader, she simply said: “Relax, Carlos. I live here.”
“Do you really,” replied Gaslamp, “or are you just going through the motions?”
“My, my, how very unheimlich of you,” remarked his wife, doffing the homburg hat I forgot to mention she was still wearing following a day of wild boar and grouse hunting after the fashion of members of the 19th century German aristocracy.
“Schochschwerenot!” exclaimed Gaslamp, continuing with the Teutonic theme.“Now I suppose that, thanks to my rhetorical indiscretion, you’re going to be up all night staring into the existential abyss.”
“To the contrary,” answered his wife, the mattress wheezing beneath her heft as she settled into her usual spot on the side of the bed closest to the fire escape. “As you’ve surely noticed, I’m an expert sleeper.”
“I see,” said Gaslamp. “But in that case, my dear, I must ask you what, exactly, a pert sleeper might be, and why you ever stopped being one to begin with?”
Well, so much for sleeping – Gaslamp’s wife laughed with such uproariousness at that unexpected little quip that Schneeballs, roused from his peaceful slumber by the sudden commotion, bit her right on the ass, and after that the poor woman was awake until morning tending to the painful wound inflicted by his small yet powerful jaws.
Eli S. Evans publishes his absurdist fictions and other oddities wherever they're accepted on the internet. In addition, two books of small stories, Obscure & Irregular and Various Stories About Specific Individuals in Particular Situations, have been published by Moon Rabbit Books & Ephemera. Buy them, they’re cheap!