I Thought I Was Someone Else #3 - A Reflection

My life continued on in this manner. At the office, riding the bus, reading the newspaper. My life on the outside still looked calm and collected and boring. But inside? Inside of my head was a whole different story. It was madness and mayhem. It was power and poetry. It was constant action. My mind was turning my humdrum life into a nonstop twenty four hour adventure, with myself as the central character, the antihero, the protagonist.

After Kingpin Chronicles had become a financial success, I made it a point to never miss any new Allen T. Watts flicks that came out. Each one was as amazing as the last. I was lost more and more into the violent world of Watts. This, of course, would lead to my undoing.

It was a Thursday morning. The previous night I had gone and seen the latest Allen T. Watts flick, a movie called Loaded Questions, for the third time. As I was shaving that morning, I was lost in thought, looking into the mirror and mentally adding myself into my favorite scenes from the film. I acted them out as well, quietly muttering in my best mobster voice:

“I don’t care what the odds are, I’m going in shootin’! If I die, I die, I’d rather not live in a world ruled by snakes. Those rotten, yella, no good pieces of trash. Why, I oughta - ”

“Oughta what?”

The question, mocking and contemptuous, of course came from my wife Clarissa, the bane of my existence. She was wearing one of the biggest, most pernicious smiles I had ever seen split her ugly mug. Her smile contained oodles of abhorrence, both for me and for what I was doing.

“A lot of women think they’ve got stupid husbands, but oh boy does mine take the cake!” Her smile reached her eyes, which began to twinkle with malice. “Quite a little performance. Oscar worthy, really. Just what in the hell are you jibber jabbering about in here? What, are you a mobster now?”

I didn’t have to check my reflection to know my cheeks were red. I didn’t have to see, reflected back to me in reverse, that I was in fact very small, and she was gargantuan. Her monstrous smile spread and stretched her cheeks, teeth glinting, a predator readying to pounce. The way she grinned, I knew she had just figured it out. When she spoke, her words were ripe with saccharin and poisonous pity.

“No…wait a minute. Not just any old mobster, is it darling? It’s…oh my GOD, that is rich! You’re trying to be that Buster K. Phlibbins, aren’t you?”

I glowered at her, the long lingering ball of hatred inside of me was beginning to nip and gnaw at the edges of my fear and tolerance.

“Oh, well don’t let me interrupt your rehearsals, Mr. Hollywood.”

The red fled from my cheeks and flooded my vision instead. I was beginning to see nothing but red; the color swallowed up everything in my vision beyond the border of her twisted, horrid, loathsome, beastly smile. The pleasure in it. The pleasure she took from humiliating me, from defiling all that I held sacred.

“I apologize for the mess, Kevin B. Spiffy, but we’re not all big-time movie stars like you, with your maids and your housekeepers. Plus my husband is an absolute pig, and a moron, so there’s only so much one woman can do.”

I ignored the insults she hurtled at me, I could take them. I was accustomed to that. But the thing that I couldn’t let go, the thing that really got under my skin, was the way that she flubbed his name. She knew what his name was, she knew he was my favorite actor, and she did that intentionally. Just to spite me. Just to be a bitch.

The red pervaded my head. I gripped my razor so tightly that it snapped in half in my hand.

“Do you do other impressions too? Like Mike Tyson or Shirley Temple? Something like that? Or do you only do Curtis J. Murphy?”

“Allen T. Watts!” I barked at her, able to take it no longer. I met her eyes. She was taken aback to see some fire in mine for a change. Still, her smile persisted as she receded from the room, slithering away so she could strike unexpectedly at a later time.

“Stick to Shirley Temple, I think someone like you would find that easier to pull off.” Her final comment, the last snide remark was, as usual, timed perfectly with her exit, making rebuttal impossible.

I stood there in silence for a time. I stood there for I don’t know how long.

I just know that I stood there until I was finally able to face myself again. Until I was able to look into the mirror and see Allen T. Watts again, not some browbeaten henpecked loser.

When I finally met my own gaze, a silent decision was made. Understanding passed between both sets of my eyes.

It was right then that I decided to kill her.