Spider Plants

Spider Plants

This morning my grown children dropped by and suggested getting their mother released from the institution. Upon hearing this suggestion, my wife -- their stepmother -- went on a tirade, scathing the children. She then grabbed a pair of scissors, took them into the kitchen and cut off her hair. All of it. Standing in front of the stove, she clipped, clipped, clipped. The children just stared in horror as red wavy clumps of my wife’s hair floated down from her head onto the linoleum floor. Once finished transforming herself, she came into the living room and stood beneath a striped spider plant wilting inside a hanging clay pot. She raised the scissors and snipped away the spider plant’s babies, tragically severing them from their mother. I thought about screaming, telling my wife to get a grip on herself. But her face filled with rage. Not to mention she still held the scissors. In fact, she still has the scissors. While the children and I remain seated on the sofa staring at one another, she is upstairs, tearing through closets and rifling through drawers -- clipping, snipping, severing.