3 a.m.
Silence.
A sleeping couple.
Loud farts... Several. In quick succession.
Him: I can't believe you did that!
Her: What?
Him: You just shattered the silence with a barrage of bottom-burps!
Her: Wasn't me!
Him: Who then?
Her: Sam Houston did it.
Him: Sam Houston was in our bedroom?
Her: Yes.
Him: And he got here how?
Her: In his buggy.
Him: So you're saying, Sam Houston, (first president of the Republic of Texas), who died in 1863, resurrected himself, and harnessed up his ghostly horses, drove in his buggy to our bedroom, where he let loose a trombone solo in the vicinity of your rear end, then got in the buggy, flicked the reins, and trotted off down the stairs and into the night?
Her: Yes. That's right.
Him: Oh.
They go back to sleep.
Outside, ghostly hooves and creaking of harness fading to the distance.
In the morning he asks her about Sam's visit. She has no recollection. And no shame at trying to pass off her farts as those of a hero of the Texas revolution.
From now on, mystery occurrences in this household, from trumps to empty ice cream cartons in the freezer, will be blamed on Sam Houston.
 |
| Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto |
(When we first met, back in 2007, and she visited me in England, as we were carrying her compendious baggage into the house, somebody farted, and it wasn't me. She looked me in the eye, and with a straight face, said "did you hear that?" "I did, I heard a fart."
"No", she said. "A bark. -it's the barking spiders."
She persisted in trying to tell me the sounds I kept hearing were made by barking spiders, a subset of arachnid I had never previously encountered. And they had followed her, from, she thought, the airport in Atlanta, Georgia, perhaps stowing away in her baggage.)
More from the bedroom: The Morning After.
