[Amake]

I was walking down the street looking for a hotel, and saw a classy lady so I thought I'd ask for directions. I said, "Do you know if there's somewhere to sleep around here?" I immediately realized this was a bad move on my part, being dressed in rags and my skin not covered in any substantial amount of glossy shit.
She looked down her nose so hard I thought she'd break her jaw as she said, "I am the Duchess of Northampton, Lady Catherine Giselda Tiberia Alianora Goodchild, wife of the celebrated neurosurgeon doctor Charles Atlas Goodchild, fidecommisar of no less than seventeen castles and founder of the fourth greatest public school of the land, and I. KNOW. NOTHING!"



Ooh, ooh, another one! Once upon a time there was a man who owned a farm. After his parents passed away, he went for three years without a single visitor and it dawned on him that he was lonely. That was mostly because he was a right unpersonable bastard and drove people away with his argumentative, invasive silences. What he needed, he thought, was a wife who didn't have any say in how far from him she wanted to be. Family, he thought, means they have to put up with you. And this being back in the day, he soon found the means to have a bride delivered to him by train. And on the appointed day, he put his horse to his carriage and went down to the train station to pick her up.

Now, the way there went without any trouble, and he spotted his wife easily as she had two large suitcases where her whole life was packed away and she looked around as if she'd never been near anything like this small town before. Frankly, even calling it a town was stretching it, it was five houses standing in a half circle around the train station, and four roads leading off into the woods. The man nodded by way of greeting, picked up the suitcases and slung them up on the carriage, led the wife on board with a firm hand and headed off home on one of these roads. You see, the farms in this land were few and far between, with miles of quiet forest roads between them. And they went on this quiet road, sitting side by side in silence for some time.

Then, all of a sudden, the horse stopped. A horse on the way home will make the effort by itself, so the man had maybe neglected to drive it properly, and now he gave it a firm lash with his whip, but still the horse wouldn't move. So he climbed down, walked up and looked the horse in the eye and said, in a low voice, "That's once." And then he climbed up and the horse started pulling as if nothing happened. But some time later, despite regular whipping, the horse stopped again. And again the man walked up to it and looked it straight in the eye and spoke to it, and he said "That's twice." The horse seemed to shiver for a moment, and looked down, and then resumed its work again.

As he sat down by his wife, she stared at him and tried to find words, but for that his silence was all too oppressive. And yet again, for some unknowable reason, the horse stopped dead on the road, and the man climbed down, took out his gun, and pointed it at the horse's forehead. "That's thrice", he said, and pulled the trigger. The gun made a short, muted, somehow scared sound but the horse fell down dead none the less. And the man took down the luggage and hefted it on his back and started walking, soon followed by his wife.

"What was that about?" she said, as bewildered as any of us would be. She was scared, yet exhilarated; her heart brought to life by the danger, the mystery, the deep dark thrill when she found herself looking into the man's pale blue eyes.

'That's once", he said.