Mr and Mrs Lime, the Dogs and the Vortex

On the outskirts of town on the wrong side of the tracks past the edge of the roughest neighbourhood stood a small and grotty brick house. In that house lived Mr and Mrs Lime and they were surely the loneliest couple ever to have lived. They never had or wanted visitors. No post ever fell on their doorstep. In fact the only time either of them ever left the house was to buy the ingredients for the horrendous meat stew they cooked up for every meal.

The strange thing about Mr and Mrs Limes self-enforced exile was that even though their hatred for other people was enormous the people they hated the most in the world was each other. Neither of them could remember why they had even got married in the first place. All they could remember was year after year of eating stew and finding more and more ways of getting on each other nerves. For example Mrs Lime knew that it annoyed her husband immensely when she didn’t deliver his stew promptly on time. She would stand by the old wood-burning stove slowly stirring the huge pot full of foul smelling runny liquid.

While his wife slowly stirred the food Mr Lime would sit at the kitchen table with his knife and fork clenched tightly in his fists. As time went on and the food was not forthcoming his face would get redder and redder until it looked as though he was going to pop. Eventually he would get so mad he would shout, the same phase he always shouted ‘Bloody hell woman, can't you get that vile slop in front of me any quicker?’. Mrs Lime would not reply she just continued to stir with a smile on her face knowing she had maddened her husband once more.

The chief way in which Mr Lime would repay his wife for the food based torture was to tyrannise the only living creatures she cared for, her five miniature terriers. Mrs Lime loved those dogs more than life itself. It was a strange thing for a woman filled with so much hatred to care so much for the little animals but she did. Mrs Lime would spend hours bathing them, playing with them and letting them run around in the tiny overgrown garden at the back of the house.

Mr Lime loathed those five little dogs, so much so that his favourite past time was kicking them across the kitchen. Unfortunately though the dogs always seemed to manage to land on something soft. As well as kicking them Mr Lime would also enjoy chasing the little dogs around the house with a butchers knife. As he did this he would shout at the top of his voice threatening to ‘cut off their little doggie tails’. Mrs Lime would shout back at him that he was ‘an ugly inhumane brute’.

This was how the Limes spent their days, winding each other up to bursting point and shouting until their lungs were raw. However one day events got too far out of hand in the Lime household and things were never the same again.

Mrs Lime was being especially slow making the stew on that fateful day. She particularly wanted to pay back her husband for shaving her favourite dog Dr Fluffy. Mr Lime was already particularly angry because one of the dogs had used his favourite chair as an impromptu toilet. The extra long wait for stew brought his rage to a new never reached level of intensity. After about an hour and a half of waiting Mr Lime finally received his foul smelling stew in the large metal vat he had become accustomed to. He was extremely hungry and extremely ready to eat, so he lifted up his fork and was about to stab it down into a piece of rancid looking meat when a miniature dogs head popped out of the stew and look him straight in the eye. The dog then jumped out of the pot onto the floor and shook himself clean of stew spraying indistinguishable lumps of food over Mr Limes legs.

After this all hell broke loose in the Lime household. It is said by some people that the shouting could be heard over a mile a way. Eventually after the noise had gone on for more than two days a neighbour called the police in to try and quieten the situation. It didn’t work, the noise continued for eight more days and the neighbour in question lost his job due to lateness caused by sleep deprivation. Eventually the Limes wore each other out and things returned to a very unstable norm. The major change that happened after all out warfare had occurred was not noticed at first by either of the Limes. The level of anger reached by Mr Lime was one that had never been reached by any other human being (not by one which had survived it any way) and he had been physically altered by it.

At first the change was almost unnoticeable a small blue spot appeared in the space between Mr Limes big and second toe. The first thing he noticed about it was that it itched constantly. A fork would be always on hand at that time to be used to scratch between his toes. It gave Mr Lime pleasure to use his wife’s fork as much as possible when she wasn’t looking. Over the next few weeks and then months the spot started to grow. It grew extremely slowly, tiny fractions of a millimetre per day. As it grew it took shape, turning into a mini-swirling vortex, it almost looked like a whirlpool between toes. It bothered Mr Lime immensely but he didn’t do anything about it.

It seemed that the vortex while annoying was pretty much useless it didn’t do anything. It just sat between toes swirling away, waiting until it had enough power to affect reality. Unknown to Mr Lime was the fact that the vortex fed on anger, it was powered by it and grew from it until it reached a crescendo. At the crescendo point the vortex would reach out and drag in whatever was the focus of Mr Limes anger at that moment. The first time it happened it is fair to say that it caught Mr Lime a little by surprise. He was trying to find the remote for his small black and white TV and getting extremely angry about it when suddenly the remote flew out from under the sofa and into the vortex between his toes.

Over time this happened more and more and Mr Lime came to realise that he was able to have some control over the blue swirl between his toes. He worked out that if he could get himself angry enough he could then focus the anger on certain objects and make them disappear into the vortex. He knew that he had to try this on one of his wife’s dogs.

Now Mrs Lime wasn’t stupid she had been watching her husband’s actions and how he had been learning to use the vortex on his foot to suck things up. She had lived with him for over thirty years and knew how his mind worked and guessed that one of her beloved dogs may be next for the suction treatment. So she decided to go to work on a little plan of her own. A year or so before Mrs Lime had bought herself a Learn Hypnosis in Ten Easy Steps book and now she spend time studying it. She practiced on one of her dogs and after much trying was able to make it believe that it was a Mongoose. After she was able to do that she went to work on her husband. She used the time when he was engaged in eating to put him under a hypnotic trance, and over a number of weeks brought him to a stage where she could change his behaviour with a click of her fingers.

The day came when Mr Lime decided he was going to use his new found power to get rid of one of the small dogs that had plagued him for so long. Mrs Lime knew what was happening she could tell from the way her husband was quieter than normal that something was up. She had already learnt to tell when the foot vortex was going to suck something as her husband would have a very glazed look on his face just before those moments.

So the stage was set for the final show down in the Lime household, although Mr Lime did not really know the full extent of what was going on. He sat in his chair watching a reality TV show about overweight hamster that he knew would anger him greatly. On the program the guest would show the host their overweight hamster and a special hamster ‘expert’ would suggest a diet and exercise program accordingly. ‘Just bloody give them less food you idiots’. Shouted Mr Lime at the TV his level of anger rising rapidly, but not quite rapidly enough to fully charge the vortex.

Mrs Lime watched her husband behaviour and saw that he needed an extra push over the edge so she surreptitiously threw a piece of meat into her husband lap to make one of the dogs jump on him. That did the trick and Mr Lime jumped out of his chair in a terrible rage. He had a gleam in his eye, as he knew this was a chance to get rid of one or maybe even all of his wife’s annoying dogs. So with his anger burning a fever pitch Mr Lime though about how annoying dogs were. He set his mind to think of nothing but stupid fluffy little yappy creatures that did nothing but frustrate him day after day, night after night.

His plan was about to work when Mrs Lime snapped her fingers and put her husband into a trance. She looked at him and smiled and then she started to speak very slowly and carefully ‘When I snap my fingers again you will no longer believe you are human, you will believe that you are a pit bull terrier’. Mr Lime stood motionless until his wife snapped her fingers again. Suddenly he dived onto all fours and started to bark like a dog. This continued for a few seconds before his look changed to one of complete and utter terror. A sucking noise filled the room and in a instant Mr Lime was sucked into the vortex on his own foot followed by a loud popping noise. Mrs Lime smiled, her plan had worked perfectly. She could now spend her days tending to her little dogs and staying away from all of humanity. Bliss!