How Mrs. Lipi Headrich Entertained Herself

(twenty years after her husband's retirement from St. Marvin's Penitentiary)

Upon waking, it baffled Mrs. Lipi Headrich to find herself settled into the depths of her brand new Outrageous Orange iJoy massage recliner with the TV volume on full. To protect her sensitive hearing, she had always requested that Mr. Headrich watch his programs without sound.

Then she remembered that the gunman had turned up the volume to drown out her screams.

Gunmen--there had been two. The first jittered around waving a pistol and demanded cash. The second yawned with boredom--just as her great-great grandchildren had during last year's Headrich-Masters family reunion. Like most of her great-great grandsons, the first gunman had long hair, but he also had a devil tattoo on one arm--useful information to share with the police when they arrived.

Lipi watched as a hefty policeman gave chase to a punk on the screen of Mr. Headrich's 1950's model RCA--hardly jaw-dropping entertainment after forty-five years of her husband's St. Marvin's Penitentiary stories. And, now that she'd survived a home invasion and the bashing in of both kneecaps with the butt of a gun, it would take far more than true Crime TV to raise her blood pressure.

Lipi's mouth stretched wide in a yawn. The events of the past few hours had wearied her. Closing her mouth with a smack of gums, she realized that her teeth were missing. Not that it mattered--she could snooze just as easily without dentures as she could with.


2. WITH A LUCID DREAM

"The five stages of grief," Lipi informed her empty living room after her husband's interment, "are refusal, conniption, obscuration, gloom and compromise."

Balancing a teacup on her knee, she considered her husband's chair. Telly Headrich's long occupation of the recliner was visible in sharp lines that formed a rectangular shape on the cushion's blue corduroy. Like all of the Headrich clan, Telly was an RCA from Bloomington, Indiana, the birthplace of coloured television.

"Refusal is what you do on your wedding night, when, instead of your new groom's manhood, you are presented with a volume control knob," she said. "Conniption occurs as a fit when a life-time warranty is left out in the rain. Gloom is what descends when the power is down."

Brazen pounding interrupted. "Mrs. Lipizzan Headrich," a voice thundered. "This is the police. We know you are in there. We have you surrounded."

Lipi's teacup teetered.

A buff policeman strode towards the frightened widow, his square eyes ablaze and handcuffs on the ready.

"You did it," he said. "You killed your husband!"

"I married a television when I thought I had married a man," Lipi said, her face awash in tears. "Can you blame me?"

"Certainly," said the policeman. "It's all in a day's work."

"I was hoodwinked!"

"Come with me, ma'am. You'll get your day in court."

Lipi wiped away her tears. She reached deep into an apron pocket and removed a still smoking gun.

"Evidence!" the policeman crowed.


3. WITH REGRETS ABOUT A GOLDEN LIFT RECLINER

It shocked Lipi to wake to the Outrageous Orange of the iJoy's upholstery. Mr. Headrich had ordered the vinyl model in classic tan, but orange brushed velour had arrived instead. The lumbar pillow had not arrived at all and the delivery boy had refused to demonstrate the chair's remote control customized massage. All this confusion and disappointment had set the couple back $599.99. American dollars, mind you, not Canadian, so the chair might as well have cost a grand.

And now she couldn't send the chair back because blood from her knees had soaked into the leg rest, staining the orange an ugly brownish-red.

The chair she had asked for--a Golden Lift Recliner--would have been the better buy. What she needed in a chair was a lever to eject her from the seat, not robotic massage. The Golden Lift reminded her of the recliner the Reverend Gelp had kept in the church study decades before: a chair to comfort both body and soul.

Aside from the colour, it rankled that the ostentatious iJoy had projected a false image of affluence to their home invaders. After slapping her face, the first gunman had shot a hole in the sock that held Mr. Headrich's coin collection. "That's it?" he said booting Lipi's leg. "That's all you fucking people got?"

Mr. Headrich struggled against the ropes that bound him.

"Maybe they spent all their cash on ugly chairs," the second gunman said.

Electrical tape covered Mr. Headrich's thick lips. His heavy-lidded eyes blazed with indignation as though he was still a prison guard and not a bald retiree with unruly bowels and an iffy prostrate. Lipi felt the familiar sting of humiliation and regret. Seven-ninths of her life had been spent inappropriately paired. If she had it to do all over again she would have made a better choice of mates.

"Sod off," Mr. Headrich said through the electrical tape on his mouth.

Lipi felt too weary to relive the second gunman shooting Mr. Headrich dead. After the events of the day, she needed her beauty sleep.


4. WITH A RECURRING DREAM

"What we need," Mrs. Lipizzan Headrich explained as she followed the handsome Reverend Marty Gelp into the gloom of St. Anne's United Church's storage room, "is about so long with two round whatsits on the bottom. We intend to use it for a prop in the first act of our play."

"Right," Reverend Gelp said, looking around. "I see. That's about six inches, then?"

"There about--once the thing's inflated."

"And Mr. Headrich didn't have one handy?"

Lipi leaned close to sniff the Reverend's baby powder scent. She tapped her head and glanced down. "He suffers from an old war wound," she said.

"Oh, right," Reverend Gelp said. "Now here's something that might do." He placed an object into Lipi's hand.

She considered the heft of the object and the silky texture of the casing. "Why, yes," she said, giving the object a firm squeeze. "I believe that this will do."


5. WITH TAKING STOCK

When she roused herself from a troubling snippet of dream, it annoyed Lipi to find that little had changed in the living room. The police had yet to arrive and the TV still blared. Mr. Headrich's head still lolled on his chest while his brains remained splattered on her collection of Hummel figurines.

The numbness had left her knee, but the pain that replaced it seemed to come from some place removed--like pain in a dream. Thankfully, both the chair's factory odour and her sick headache had diminished. The fresh air circulating the room helped, no doubt.

"Why don't we just put out a sign," Mr. Headrich had grumbled when Lipi used a broom to shift a doorstop into place. He wrote in the air with a finger, "Burglars welcome here."

"I'd like to see you try living with a sensitive nose," Lipi snipped.

"I do," he said. "Every blessed day."


6. WITH A NIGHTMARE

"Well," Lipi Headrich said to her husband as the pair was ushered into hell. "This is certainly unexpected."

"Isn't."

"Well, not for some perhaps," she looked around. "But I had reason for happier expectations."

"Keep it moving, folks." A guard in a dirt-stained devil's costume prodded the couple with a plastic trident.

"Young man," Lipi said. "Is there a complaints department somewhere close by?"

"Move it, lady," the devil said. "Those are the rules. Keep moving, no matter what."

"We're moving. No need to poke."

As they joined a queue of the dead slogging across an arena of dirt, Lipi tugged on her husband's shirt-sleeve. "Will you look at that poor creature, three corpses up. It's so emaciated." She scanned the crowd. "But then they're all emaciated, aren't they?"

A quick check confirmed that Telly was still a full-bodied man with a barrel belly and sagging breasts. Lipi's less substantial flesh also appeared to be intact. "Well, I suppose we'll do all right. If the competition's sickly, I mean. Still, I wouldn't like..."

The sound of heavy machinery over-rode the whine of her voice. Five bulldozers with Outrageous Orange ploughs moved in unison across the arena from the rear. "We can't die here, can we? Not if we've already done that." Terrible screams echoed through the arena as the bulldozer's mowed down the dead.

"I don't see why not," her husband said as he removed his head and placed it face up in his wife's hands. As a bulldozer turned in their direction, he got on his knees and scratched at the dirt with his hands.

"Have you gone stark raving mad?" Lipi said. "They're sure to have rules against this sort of behaviour."

Mr. Headrich sat back on his haunches and retrieved his head. He placed it in the shallow depression. The nose jutted an inch or two above the top. He removed the head, placed it beside the pit and continued digging.

Lipi folded her arms over her chest. "I cannot imagine what you think scrabbling about in the dirt will accomplish."

"I'm digging my own grave." Mr. Headrich's eye winked. "Just like when I married you." The wink took Lipi back sixty-one years to the day when she had read in young Telly Headrich's face a promise to stick by her side come heaven or hell. With that look, he had won her away from other more conditional suitors.

Though it hurt to do so, she knelt beside her husband's body. With her eyes on the Outrageous Orange blade of an advancing bulldozer, she scooped a tiny handful of dirt from the pit and deposited it beside the smirking head. "There," she said. "I hope you're satisfied."


7. WITH...

"Ma'am?" the policeman said. "Can you hear me?"