From their twenty-third story apartment building they had a magnificent view of the city.
He woke with a feeling of extreme tightness around his chest. As his focus returned he became aware of his situation. The view before him was truly magnificent. This was a major factor when they were choosing a place. However, taking in the scenery was never envisaged as something you would do hanging from a rope! The chest restriction was a rope, tethered to the rail of their balcony just above his head. He started to scream.
This was responded to by a loud “Shush!”
He looked up with some difficulty. He could just make out his wife’s face peering down. “Shush,” she repeated, “no need to disturb the neighbours.”
He found that talking was made difficult by the compression of his chest, along with lifting his head back in order to work his jaw. “What’s happening to me?” he garbled.
She smiled down. “It was in the tea.”
“In the what?”
“In the tea. The drug was in the tea. The nice cuppa I made for you, using your preferred raw sugar. Aren’t I thoughtful?”
“For goodness sake! What’s happening?”
From above, he heard, “I would have thought that was pretty obvious my sweet; much better to ask why.”
He wriggled around trying to make himself more comfortable. It didn’t work. “OK. Why?” he croaked.
“Well, I guess it all just came to a head, really. For, let me see now, twenty-four, twenty-five years you have been putting raw sugar in my tea, when I much prefer the regular white.”
“You can’t tell me…”
“It’s best if you don’t interrupt me at this point!” she shouted. “So,” she went on, in a softer voice, “if you consider that on any given day of the week you would probably make the teas twice, that’s fourteen times a week. OK so far?”
He grunted.
“OK. Let’s call it fourteen times fifty weeks. That’s seven-hundred a year. Then by twenty-five… well, I worked it out to be seventeen-and-a-half-thousand! Can you believe that?”
Silence from below.
“Now,” she went on, “when you consider that most times you make my tea, you use raw instead of white sugar; that would equate to around four-thousand times.” She giggled to herself. “Four-thousand; just imagine how mad that made me; how mad I am now. I must be fairly unhinged at this stage, to do this I mean?” She fell silent. “I hate raw sugar! It always tastes of molasses to me. You say it doesn’t, but it does, and I hate it.” There was a long silence. “Now, I need to leave you for a bit. This rope is pretty strong and I’m going to need my big sowing scissors.”
He started to scream again.
When she returned, she leant over and started cutting.
With the final snip, his eyes snapped open.
As he lay there, sweating and still trembling, he put things together. No alarm had been set. It was Sunday morning.
She stirred beside him.
He swung his legs out of bed. “I’ll get the teas, honey; with white for you, of course.”