"Are you sleeping with her?" She asks, wringing her paper hands and furrowing her feathery brow. He liked her fragility, her delicacy, her bird-like qualities. But he never liked how she squawked in his ear, constantly pecking at him and twittering about unimportant things.

On a normal day, in a normal marriage, the husband might get offended by such an accusation. But Jack Hound was not offended at all. He wasn't guilty of the crime, either. His apathy was due to the fact that Jack Hound was too bored to feel insulted.

His days were an endless cycle of suburban entrapment. He woke up every morning at six o'clock sharp, next to his pretty little wife, in his nice white picket fence house with a neatly trimmed lawn. He would tie a robe around his slender waist and slip his feet into a pair of loafers. He would make a pot of coffee for himself and for his wife when she woke up, and he would take his steaming cup-o-joe out to the front porch, where he would sip the burning, tasteless liquid and watch the nonexistent traffic roll by. After a few sips and scans of the neighborhood, he would walk down his smooth paved driveway to fetch the daily newspaper and the mail. He would feel a damp breeze spray his face, from his neighbor's sprinklers. He would grumble and complain to himself about how his neighbors cared too much about their lawns and fancy cars, and that realtors and lawyers must be the most annoying people on the planet, excluding reporters. After flipping through his mail, he would take his breakfast (that his wife made the night before), and gobble it down before quickly getting dressed to go to work. He would then drive fifteen minutes into town to his job, where he would spend most of the day and some of the evening. Then he would return home, eat dinner, watch mindless TV propaganda, and then read a book before falling asleep in bed. None of these things were sins alone, no, but Jack found the routine to be hopeless. He hated being predictable, having such a standard and lame pattern. He felt tired about the world, and no longer saw a purpose in anything.

Jack had reached a midlife crisis at a very young age. He found his life, in general, to be utterly unentertaining. He had previously reached a point of such severe stress that he simply couldn't find it in himself to be stressed anymore. He didn't know who or what to blame for this. Perhaps his job, a teaching position. His students had no interest in modern literature, but they all seemed to have an interest in him.

He taught at an all-girls school, someplace that was probably Catholic because the other teachers (all women) looked like wrinkly hags, and the girls were exceptionally promiscuous. The students would hike up their skirts three inches before entering his classroom, unbutton the first two buttons on their blouses, and take the gum off the back of their neck to plop in their mouth. They would sit through his lectures, either cross-legged or spread out enough so he knew that if he looked he would see their panties. They would smack their gum, occasionally popping a bubble and slowly licking off the remaining sticky pieces from their glossy lips. It would distract him, not because they were successful in seductively drawing attention to their mouths, but because he absolutely hated the sound of gum being loudly chewed.

They were pretty girls, yes, and he was a man, yes. But Jack Hound was not an idiot, and he wasn't going to risk his job over a silly pubescent girl.

Besides, every day he had the luxury of returning to his home to listen to his songbird. Of course, she stopped singing a year or two ago, and instead had taken up mindless chattering and annoying cawing. He would never tell her how he felt, because he hated to ruffle her feathers. It wouldn't bring back her bird-of-paradise spirit, because that had long since fluttered out the window. But he still enjoyed coming home and hoping that maybe the crow was gone and the lark had returned. It was that hope that kept him coming home, because even if he didn't feel it these days--he had been terribly in love with her once.