#36 Shiny

by Jude Bridge

Mrs McPherson splodged onto her dimpled, privileged knees and squinted at the floor.

“Not clean enough, I want to see my face in the tiles,” she puffed.

I swear the tiles flinched.

“I want to see you scrubbing the tiles with my old toothbrush,” the fat bitch continued.

And I want to see you cleaning your teeth with my old mop, I thought. But I scrubbed, oh how I obediently scrubbed, and sweated, and polished, until the tiles glowed.

Mrs McPherson wobbled down her classic, inherited staircase on massive, meat-and-red-wine-filled legs and tripped on the oversized Venetian glass paperweight which I had strategically placed on the bottom step. She skidded across the shiny floor, pausing only to see her ugly, surprised face in the silver tiles, before pitching headlong through them. The poor things had finally cracked under her mighty weight, after years of being tortured to within an inch of their glossy lives. She crunched into the structuring beneath, until only her legs and feet were visible, sticking artistically upright up like a demented chair.

I removed her slippery slippers, sat on her feet, lit one of her fancy cigarettes (which I had stolen on Tuesday) and watched the dust settle.