Thursday, September 28, 2017

What We Don't Know

What We Don't Know
By Michael Cannata  





He came home early on Friday and found his wife cleaning out his office closet. She needed some extra space, she explained, and the office closet was the only one with enough to spare. When questioned why she needed it, his wife just smiled teasingly. "You don’t want to spoil the surprise do you?" she answered with a playful expression. She locked the closet with the old skeleton key and made him promise not to peek.

It wasn’t hard to figure out why she wanted the space. Their anniversary was coming up on Wednesday. He was sure she was planning a big surprise. Maybe he was better off not knowing. Still, the fact he knew something was going on, but not what, was eating away at him. Even his next door neighbor was acting funny and smiling at him in a knowing way, as though he was in on her secret.

A lot of money had been withdrawn from their bank account recently; too much for a simple gift. She was obviously going all out. Whatever she'd bought, it was big. Maybe as big as the 50” HDTV and sound system he had been hinting at?

Despite his urge to snoop around he kept his promise. He didn’t peek, exactly. However, he did come up with a way around his promise. He’d set the webcam on the office computer so it would turn on whenever there was motion in the room. His wife worked nights on Tuesday. He would view the video then to see what she was up to. On Tuesday evening, after his wife went off to work, he finally sat down at the computer, excited at the prospect of learning the forbidden knowledge his wife was keeping from him.

He played back the video and watched as his wife came into the room followed by his neighbor. As they talked she took a large amount of money and the closet key out of her purse and handed it to him. The man went into the closet and his wife began to close the door. He turned up the volume and when he heard her final words he knew that he’d made a big mistake.

"Shoot him tonight!" she instructed. "He always works at his desk on Tuesdays when I work at the office."


He realized what day it was as he heard the click of the gun being cocked behind him.

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