This, female Tisiphone, who went by the seraphic name of Angel Anna, liked to have hen-pecked Henry firmly under her big claw – squashed and gasping for air.
Nothing he did was right enough for this modern incarnation of the ancient Fury, and poor Henry was verbally flogged and stridently berated by his nit-picking, mite-reaping, tick-juggling Hen on steroids.
Poor Hen-pecked Henry was hectored and harangued from pillar to post to rostral column from the crack of dawn to the cunt of dusk and nothing he did was good enough for Miss hoity-toity snooty snotty.
If he donned a chef’s hat and whipped up a meal she’d goad him with insults. If he pulled the apron strings and did the dishes she’d load him with obloquy. She clipped his wings and hoarded the feathers in the musty attic of her callous heart.
The winds of caprice swept through the landscape of her opinion and altered it from day to day: “Don’t walk here! Don’t stand there! Don’t hang to the right! Don’t sit in my sight!”
The doleful rumble of the doldrums compelled him to smoke the pipe of melancholy and chew the fat of loneliness in the doghouse long enough to have it furnished, fumigated, and painted morose maroon.
Poor Henry – not only was his heart broken but he had an aching appendix and painful pancreas as well. He was foxed and flummoxed. He didn’t know what to do. How could he please Angel Anna?
He summoned up all the cadres of courage that were lounging in the barracks of his personality and sent them charging forth to the frontlines of confrontation with Angel Anna.
He asked Angel Anna why things were so bad between them even though he loved her. She glowered at him and if looks could kill poor Henry would be a cold corpse sharing a ferryboat ride with Charon over the Styx on a one-way trip to the bowels of Hades.
She insisted that love didn’t live in their house any more and that cupid was busy sodomising soda-sodden school kids by the Popsicle store. She told him to be more loving or not come back.
This was a Scylla and Charybdis situation indeed. He couldn’t leave but he couldn’t stay. Confusion drove the natural ruby of his cheeks and blanched his woebegone countenance.
He left, wondering how he could be more loving. He decided to mount the Pegasus of yore and send it galloping in the direction of love poetry. Instead it merely cantered at the rate of three lines an hour and then hung down its head in shame and expired.
Poor Hen-pecked Henry sat on the eggs of indecision and brooded until the germ of an idea hatched in his head.
He knew what to do. He ambled into Danny’s Dating Agency and found himself a frisky young chickadee, who doted on Henry and hung on his every word. She was besotted with him and nuts and crackers about him.
They were happy as two magpies fornicating under a balmy tropical sun fluttering from one palm tree of wanton love to another.
The two ambled arm in arm to Angel Anna. “I’m back,” Henry said, in post-coital elation. “You wanted me to be more loving; so now I am loving more.”
