Rest in Peace

In a matrimonial arena where nocturnal thunder issues from one man’s uvula, a young wife—exasperated beyond the threshold of uxorial tolerance—banishes her husband’s rib-cage percussion to a distant chamber, chaining him to a regimen of mandated hibernation and forbidding the green-felt fraternities that once perfumed his evenings with cigar smoke and bluff. Yet the gambler’s itch, that exquisite rash of risk, festers beneath his skin; he orchestrates a sonic bait-and-switch, pressing the club’s most volcanic snorer into service as aural decoy. While counterfeit rumble drifts through corridors, our uxorious escapee slinks toward clandestine cards, only to be hurled into a Keystone-styled cyclone of police torches, flying cues, and marital reckoning. One dawn, identities collapse like poorly shuffled decks: the wrong man is found beside the marital counterpane, the right one scampers home, and equilibrium—fragile, farcical—resettles like chalk dust on a billiard sleeve.