Random Story To Tell

Feeling please with his morning’s work, he took up his basket and hummed to himself as he made his way back home. “I wouldn’t want to hurt her,” he thought, “but it would do her good to sit at the bottom of a cold, dark pit for just one night.”

The sound of the latch woke up his wife, who had been asleep all the morning in front of the stove.

“What time do you call this?” she demanded. “And look at the basket: it’s not early full. I suppose you couldn’t find any more cranberries than that. Just like you; I knew I should have gone myself.”

“There was another bush, my dear,” said Antipka, gently, “but as it was getting late I thought I’d come back home and go out again this afternoon.”

“You selfish brute,” his wife screamed. “I’m supposed to spend all day shut up indoors while you go out and enjoy the autumn sunshine. But I’m not taking orders from you any more. I’ll go and pick the berries off the last bush and you can stay indoors this afternoon.”

And so after their small lunch, with which Antipka had to drink water for having broken the milk jug that morning. Antipka’s wife tied a sack round her waist and threw her blackk shawl across her shoulders.

“While I’m gone don’t laze about,” she told him.
“No dear,” said Antipka.

And she left, slamming the door behind her. When she had gone a little way along the dusty road to the maize-fields, Antipka slipped out of the house and followed her to see if his plan would work.

She went straight up to the last cranberry bush licking her lips and pushing up her sleeves in much the same as he did whenever she was going to beat her husband. But she never reached the berries, for as soon as she stepped on to the covering of twigs and sleeves, it gave way under her weight and with a loud shriek, she disappeared from sight.

As he hurried up, Antipka was just in time to hear the faint thud of something heavy landing far away in soft mud. A moment of silence followed and then, unmistakably, he caught his wife’s voice nagging and scolding from the very bottom of the darkness.

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