Overreaction Toast (True Story)
Sometimes my wife overreacts in ways that freak me out. False alarms. While they turn out to be false, they really really really seem like legit alarms when they’re going off.
Hypothetically, I’ll be driving us along and she’ll grab my arm in a near bone-shattering grip and shout “LOOK!!!” Later, when we retell the story, she’ll say that I randomly swerved like a lunatic and missed seeing a really cool hat she saw on some pedestrian, and I’ll say that I had momentary heart failure when she tricked me into thinking there was an invisible bus milliseconds from crashing into us and then changed the subject to some polka dot hat somewhere.
So, last week…
My wife and I like to do night snacks. We know it’s the worst time to eat, late at night. Blah. We just finished watching a show and were cleaning up. As she’s walking away, she asks:
- Oh, can you grab my plate?
Sure.
I grabbed it and saw there was still a bit of toasted pretzel bread, wearing its delicious quilt of cream cheese. How could I resist? No seriously. I’m asking. I don’t actually know how to resist.
- Great movie.
(crunch) Yemmffss. (crunch)
Lizzie had been walking ahead of me as we entered the kitchen, but she slowed to an unnaturally fast stop and pivoted on her heel to face me. She had a look of shock on her face. Her eyes were big and fixed on my munching jaw like she was trying to stop time with her eyeballs. She yelled:
- What are you doing!?!
Hmmfff??????
My jaw was frozen mid-chew when she started to ask me what I was eating, but the words died on her lips as her eyes flicked rapidly back and forth between my mouth and the empty plate in my hands. She knew the answer. And apparently that answer made her eyes go even bigger!
- I killed a spider with that!
Mnnyaugh!!! (or however you spell the sound you make when spitting out food as if your life depended upon it.)
As I’m retelling this story now, I’m not sure if the force that launched the half-chewed wad out of my head was more from my mouth explosively jettisoning spider-contaminated food, or if it was actually the bread attempting to flee from a mouth with a f##king spider in it!
I repeatedly pushed out my tongue to evict every last atom of what I’d been blissfully chomping on in ignorance. I probably looked like a dog that got into the peanut butter jar, but it still shocked me when she started laughing! HARD!
- I didn’t kill it WITH the toast! I just killed it on the edge of the plate!
(I said something I can’t quite remember now and probably couldn’t publish even with a bunch of #s if I were able to recall.)
She started laughing harder, but I’m pretty sure that my unprintable response was not intended to increase audience appreciation. She came over and put her hand on my shoulder. I’m going to say it was to soothe me and my potentially spider-infested mouth, but you and I both know it was to steady herself from the knee-crippling effects of laughing insanely.
She kept apologizing breathlessly in between the fits of convulsive laughter, because she couldn’t stop herself. I kept scrubbing my tongue with a paper towel and giving her pretend dirty looks, to keep her going. I was having trouble at this point suppressing my own laughter. Good times!
True story.
Now before anyone gets all Condescension Dundee on me about what a REAL mouthful of mystery yuk is, or starts copying/pasting into the comments the number of household bugs the average human eats in their life while sleeping, just remember: it was the look on her face! The OVERREACTION! It was a total setup for thinking the worst! Of course I was going to immediately imagine that I was mindlessly nomming down on some giant chainsaw-juggling tarantula with a wicked case of the Ebola virus!
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