Harmless by Ernie Lindsey

understand where you went wrong?
    In the closet hung
neatly arranged clothes, organized by cut, color, and season, just like mine. 
    Can you grasp the
enormity of this?  I’m telling you, even our hearts would’ve beaten in unison.
    I could smell traces of
perfume so sweet I could almost taste it, like a mixture of peaches and cotton
candy.  I missed Kerry already.
    On the floor sat a box
of loose papers.  Old bills, ancient receipts, pay stubs, and, finally, the
large envelope from our mutual attorneys.  A quick scan revealed that her
possible murderer, the man that had created a crevasse in my soul the size of
the Grand Canyon, was named William Davis Oliver.  I’ve never liked the name
William, for a variety of reasons that are too long to list, and the fact
immediately assigned a deeper feeling of absolute hatred.
    Congratulations,
William, welcome to the top of my Arch Nemesis List.
    I stood up from the
floor, papers in hand, thinking about how to find him.  How to bring about a
little payback.  Officer Planck would know, and I made a mental note to call
him.
    When I noticed some of
my shirts hanging among hers, it felt like I was the one that had been shot and
thrown from the window.

CHAPTER 6
    If you need a quick
refresher, here’s what I found that belonged to me: one pair of slacks, three
shirts, a stack of Entertainment Weekly magazines, and a shoebox full of
photos that could’ve only been pulled from my iPhone.  The photos included
selfies of Sparkle and me in the bathroom mirror, shots of Smoke and Shade, and
one picture of Angry Shayna after I informed her that I was moving on. 
    To say that I was
flabbergasted, shocked, and utterly mystified wouldn’t do my emotions justice. 
I couldn’t have been more floored if you’d laid me down on the ground.
    Not only had she
commandeered my cat while he was out on walkabout, but Kerry had been inside
my house, stealing my things .
    When?  Why?
    What could possibly be
the reason, and why such innocuous items?  If she was going to steal from me
with harmful intent, why not take valuable things?  To be fair, I had little in
the way of valuables in my house, per se, but still…she could’ve taken
my laptop, or the DVD player, or my collectible baseballs, autographed by
Willie Mays and Barry Bonds. 
    The baseballs were an
unnecessary expense, according to a certain ex-wife whom I’m sure you’re quite
familiar with by now.  You’d think I’d committed a crime punishable by death
for skipping a mortgage payment for two months, without permission or
knowledge.  But come on—Barry Bonds and Willie Mays?  Classic Giants!  However,
I’ll allow that I overpaid.  Excitement and a lack of due diligence on my part
resulted in expensive consequences.
    If I had removed my
things then, if I hadn’t gone back inside and dug a little deeper into the
closet and found what I’d found, it would’ve saved me a lot of undue stress,
but I was overcome by the urge to speak to her, to ask her why, however
unobtainable the answers may have been from her dead body.
    Those words…“her dead
body”…it’s been months, and they still bother me.
    I ran out of the
bedroom, through the hall, and practically leapt down the stairs.
    I paused to gather
myself at the doorway, just in case that nosy old hag Mrs. Epstein happened to
be monitoring the neighborhood with her talons hovering over the telephone.  No
sense in giving her any more ammunition than was warranted. 
    Twice now she’s called
the police on me for sunning myself in the front yard, citing public indecency.
 It’s a known fact that men wear thongs while tanning.  I’ve seen it, I’ve
researched it, and I provided examples to the officers answering the calls.  I
can’t help it that she’s offended by the male body.  The harridan should be
thankful that I might possibly be worth looking at, instead of some slovenly,
rotund guy that resembles a hairy snowball. 
    Kerry lay on the
ground,