"You know what this marriage is like," Jeannie said, breaking the smothering silence that had been brooding over the kitchen like a giant hen's ass squatting above a stone egg. "It's like a relay race in which I can never hand off the baton."
Peter looked up from his bowl of cornflakes.
He thought carefully for a moment before delivering himself of his own metaphor for their not-always-excruciating eleven-year union.
"For me, it's like trying and not being able to come up with a six-letter word for Arab Spring." He was still thinking of the online crossword puzzle he'd been trying work that morning.
Jeannie crunched another wad of cereal and low-fat milk lodged in her cheek. She thought that if she could only come up with an answer to Peter's puzzle she could shut him up, if not for good, at least for a good long time. She could have gotten in the last word at long last.
Not that it would solve her own problem. No, not by a long shot. Nothing would really be solved. There would just be another baton in her fist and another long lap ahead of her.
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