From Chapter 1 "Scissors" I am normally a pretty tidy person (in spite of Damian’s malicious remarks to the contrary), but this particular pair of scissors I put down somewhere, only for a moment, and later could not, for the life of me, remember where I left them. Damian, on the other hand, would remember hours later, when there no longer was a trace of the incident in my mind. Moni was showing the same inclination towards unexplained amnesia. “What scissors?” he would ask. He wouldn’t dare ask Damian for them though, instead leaving that burden to me, seeing as he considers me closer to his father than he is. Worth noting at this point is that I was initially, foolishly pleased with Damian’s present (the manicure set). Following its appearance, our family underwent a couple of months of continuous tension. During the day we would be unnecessarily anxious and during the night we would wake suddenly, drenched in sweat. Moni and I started to suffer intense feelings of guilt, while Damian became even more aggrieved than usual. At times, I would try and feed him some healthy reasoning, suggesting the sober and, in my opinion, intelligent question of whether it wouldn’t be better to place the scissors somewhere in the unlocked vicinity, and, if they happened to get lost again, we could simply purchase a new pair. It was not long before I abandoned these suggestions, because Damian took them as a manifestation of my innate ungratefulness. Things came to a halt, when one day, our daughter, Baby, went to school with her unnaturally long manicure since Damian wasn’t home to unlock the cupboard. It was then that I explained to him that, by the way, this manicure set is my property and I had the right to lose it, if I so wished, to throw it out, if I so wished, or to cut it into small pieces, if I so wished. To this, he replied that the manicure set might be mine, but he had purchased it for me, and I would not have thought about buying such a useful object, and I replied to him, that I don’t care one bit for his useful objects, when the use for them is equal to zero, and he told me that I can’t cook, and I told him that I now understand why his son is such great success, taking after his father, and he told me to ‘excuse’ him, because Moni is the spitting image of me, the same insufferable know-it-all that I am, and I replied that he is a maniac, materialist and consumer, and then he extracted from his heart, I beg your pardon, I meant to say from the cupboard—the Scissors of Discord, flung them on the table and told me to do whatever I want, for he has no further interest in this matter. From this day onward, a sense of normality returned to our home, at least as far as the scissors were concerned, and they disappeared a couple of weeks later as if they were never there in the first place. The nail files, to date, are in flawless condition.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 07:49:51 +0000