Bluebeard’s wife, Margaret, stood outside the door, wondering if she dare defy her husband.
“Well,” she said, “if God hadn’t wanted locks picked, He wouldn’t have created bobby-pins.” Margaret opened to door, expecting a Man Cave with big-screen TV, minifridge, and girlie magazines.”
While the room revealed her husband’s primitive side, the technology was medieval. Torture racks, axes, a crimson-stained butcher’s table with meat cleaver lodged in it. Turning to go, she encountered the room’s greatest horrors: four heads impaled on spikes. The withered heads bore striking resemblances to women Margaret had seen in her husband’s photo albums, women he had been married to.
As she re-entered the hallway, her husband walked toward her.
“I told you don’t enter that room.” His voice, deep and booming, carried a trace of sadness. “You disobeyed me. Go to the east tower and make peace with God. I’ll join you soon.”
“Me? You need to go make peace with God, mister. I asked you a dozen times if you still saw your exes. ‘No, Margaret, never,’ you said. Now I find this. I don’t want to know what freakiness you get up to with those heads, but it ends today. I’m going to bury their remains in the backyard and call Goodwill to haul away that crap. Tomorrow, I’m calling the decorators to redo that room as a fitness center. Are we clear?”
“Yes, dear,” Bluebeard mumbled.
“I thought so,” Margaret said, going to the utility closet for vinyl gloves and an extra-large trashbag.
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