Prompts/Practice

Prompt - His Snoring is the Last Straw (found on The Hub)

She had been thinking about it for days. Months. Years. The man she married wasn’t who she thought he was and she was tired of being let down. Don’t get me wrong, things didn’t seem that way at first. In the beginning, things were great, as they usually are, but after some time the little things started to get to Brenda.

You know the “little things” that I’m talking about, don’t you? Brenda started to notice that no matter where she put the laundry basket the clothes never seemed to make it inside. She also started to notice the odd smell that followed him around after work and the obnoxious way he rubbed his calloused feet together. The sound of the dead skin on one foot rubbing against the dead skin on the other was enough to make her vomit. And he would do it for minutes at a time throughout the day. Rubbing. Scratching. Picking at the peeling skin. It truly was a nasty habit.

But after a few years, Brenda learned to ignore some of the sounds and the smells emanating from her husband, but she couldn’t deny that he was absolutely repulsive to her. Sure, she pretended like she was happy and she certainly fooled a lot of people, including her husband, but one day, Brenda had had enough.

Oh. I forgot to mention earlier that Brenda’s husband snored. Loudly. Constantly. Every. Single. Night. She tried earplugs and pillows. She tried kicking him and pushing him onto his side. But nothing worked. In fact, he seemed to be getting louder with each passing year, and Brenda was beginning to lose her mind from lack of sleep and her husband’s disgusting habits.

One night, after Brenda had been pacing for hours trying to talk herself out of divorce and/or running away, she made a decision. Granted, it wasn’t the decision anyone would expect her to make, but it was a decision that changed her life nonetheless.

Brenda went to the garage and began to search through her husband’s tools and other piles of junk (Brenda’s words, not mine). After a few minutes, Brenda found what she needed and retreated back into the house. She went into the kitchen, took a shot of whiskey, and went upstairs to the room she shared with her husband.

She climbed on top of him, shouted “WE’RE DONE”, and slammed the axe down onto her husband’s sleeping body. Sadly, one hack to the head wasn’t enough for Brenda. Even after he was dead, Brenda continued to hit her husband’s corpse with the axe until he was an unrecognizable mess of blood, tissue, and bone.

Once Brenda finished her job, her legs gave way and she slumped down onto the bloody bed. She picked up the phone and called the police. As she was telling the 911 operator “his snoring was the last straw”, she opened the side table drawer, pulled out her husband’s revolver, put the barrel into her mouth, and blew herself away.