Her favorite chore

The house was warm and bright, smelling of lemons and gunpowder.

Martha picked up the laundry basket, almost spilling over with soiled clothing, and used the .357 revolver to weight it all down. She didn't want to pick up one more sock or shirt or skidmarked underwear, from her nice clean floor.

She was sure, this trip, she got all of them. God, she hoped she got all of them.

Her demeanor was neutral, neither happy nor sad, and she did not have a merry tune brimming in her heart. Only a dull thump-thump in her chest made the tempo for which she padded across the house, toward the laundry room.

The kitchen was her first stop, before tackling the stained garments. She set the laundry basket on the counter, to the left of the cutting board, where three lemons lay motionless, a butcher knife beside them. She made her short way to the fridge, removed a bottle of Bombay Gin, and set it to the right of the cutting board. Then fetching a highball glass, followed by three ice cubes, and finally a room-temperature bottle of tonic water, she returned to the Gin, combined the items in their appropriate mixture, and proceeded to cut the lemon into sixths. She, not a fan of lime, put on sixth of the now eighteen pieces of lemon, in her perfectly proportioned Gin and Tonic.

In two gulps, she downed the whole glass.

Her face made an involuntary wince.

She burped.

Pouring another glass of nothing but tonic water, she dropped five of the lemon slices in the glass, and piled the rest atop the laundry.

The lemon didn't have much weight, so she left the revolver, some of the juice meeting the metal.

She would clean it later.

Proceeding to the laundry room, still without emotion or care, she carefully placed the blood-soaked cloths in the washing machine in a specific way; the machine would not dance today, out of balance, if she had something to say about it.

After putting half the load in, she tucked the revolver into her apron pocket, and dumped in the rest, no longer concerned about all the dancing that would ensue during the spin cycle. It was more important the balance on the bottom was even anyway, right?

She squeezed the lemons into the machine, dumped in the tonic and lemon slurry, and tossed in the spent rines.

She cranked the setting handle to maximum soiling, high wash, fast spin, no sound. The machine fired up with a purr.

She loved that sound. The vibrant hum. Always there, always promising of cleanliness and order. This was the highlight of most days. If she had the time to ponder it, it would seem like a sad commentary.

He didn't care for order. He didn't care for cleanliness. And clearly, he didn't care for her.

He was chaos. He was imbalance personified. In her clean, organized, orderly world, he was a tornado in a trailer park.

She liked balance, understood it even. Light and dark, good and evil, meat and potatoes. But a finely tuned balance was even in distribution.

He offset the even nature of her existence. And so, he had to go.

She removed the revolver, opened the cylinder, emptying the six spent shells from the wheel, and tossed them in the trash.

His cleaning kit was in their shared sleeping quarters, ten feet from his corpse, naked and motionless, like the lemons on the cutting board, before she sliced them mercilessly.

She spun the cylinder like an old west cowboy, snapping it back into its home, and returned the revolver to her apron.

Laundry cleaned first, then the gun. In that order. To do one, while doing the other, was spitting focus. Loss of focus leads to mistakes. Mistakes that can easily be avoided inevitably ventured into the realm of chaos.

She already killed chaos once today. That was sufficient.