The Waiting Game

He sat and waited. He always sat and he always waited. That was all he could do, now. Ever since. That... Ever since... He began to cry at the thought of that day, just over 25 months ago, when his wife, his loving wife, found out about what he had been doing.

But he hadn't being doing anything bad. Not really. He had just being having fun. Yeah, just having some fun.

He had found the first group on line by accident. He had been searching for a group where his Python writing skills would be sought after. He'd done it before back in the old country, before they'd moved to the good old USA. Back home the Internet forum rules had been strict. No advertising or canvasing for any type or form of business opportunities.

But he'd learned how to circumvent those petty rules. Ways to communicate with PMs, or emails.

Until his wife had been offered that job at that prestigious university in America. He'd begged her to stay, asked her to consider the opportunities if she'd remain in their home country.

What happened? She laughed in his face!

"Look, darling," she'd said, trying to sound sympathetic. "I'm 30, yet the University is offering me a full professorship, head of the School of Advanced Neosciences at a salary ten times what I'm on, a mini mansion, plus I'd report directly to Lennox Robles, the Dean. I'd be a fool not to take it."

"But what about my work?"

"There are plenty of opportunities in the USA for someone with your skills. After all, wasn't Python, your language of choice, invented in America?"

Her sudden, though misinformed, interest in his work took him unawares. "Actually, no, it was invented by a Dutchman called Guido van Rossum. Mind you, he did work for two of the major American-based concerns, Google and Dropbox, so I can see why you'd presume it was created in America. After all, Dropbox is written in Python." He shut up when he realised her eyes had started to glaze over.

And so it was she resigned from her position as senior lecturer in Neosciences at the West Midlands University and he sold his few clients on to a couple of friends and they moved to their new life in America.

At first it had been great. Or "awesome!" as his wife's new colleagues would say when they got together for departmental BBQs. They weren't bad people. Not at all. But where they his type? No. And then he got bored. And he began trolling message boards, using his knowledge to fuck with people's minds

Oh! The fun he had! Then he got even more bored, he developed a feeling of ennui. So he decided that, as his wife was so busy with her new chums, that he might start looking for some human companionship. Some female companionship.

He never did find out what had possessed his wife Nancy to return home early that afternoon. But return home early she did, catching him and some bimbo who he had met on a safe forum for cheating spouses to meet up on and to hook up in real life. "Yeah!" he had thought bitterly, "It was safe right enough, until your damn spouse comes home early and catches you flagrante delicto with a lover."

After his lover had fled, Nancy had began beating him without mercy, using an antique brass table lamp. In the Moorish style, garishly ornate and very, very heavy.

He had tried to defend himself, but he had failed to do so and as he lay on the large woolen rug between the window and the bed, he realised that Nancy, his loving wife, had killed him.

Nancy was strong. She'd taken his corpse, unseen, with the bloody rug, in a wheelbarrow to her laboratory furnace. She'd exsanguinated him, then cut him up into bite sized morsels and had burnt him, and the rug, into ashes, which she had placed in the hollow base of the Moorish lamp.

He cried. Actually, his ghost cried. If Nancy had been even the slightest bit psychic she might have heard him. But she wasn't, so she didn't. And she began dating a fellow professor. Would she be found out for her husband's slaying? Maybe. But that was a problem for another day. As it was she's have to track the bimbo down. And there was room enough for at least another set of remains in that Moorish lamp.