Yes Dear

A domestic tyranny of lace and side-eye imprisons the stout jurist inside his own mahogany parlour, yet the wily magistrate fashions a marionette from starched collars, meerschaum ash, and a player-piano’s pneumatic heart; into this hollow effigy he slips a garrulous parrot trained to croon “Yes, dear” with the mechanical docility of a repentant husband. While the false Rummy nods in clockwork obeisance, the real one slips the leash, commandeering the gaslit boulevard where a chance pick-up—flapper, firefly, fleeting promise—becomes his partner in nocturnal delinquency. Back home, the wife’s suspicion ferments; she interrogates the dummy, senses the hollow echo, then brandishes a Ouija stylus that writhes across the board like a dowsing rod of marital vengeance. The planchette arrows point street after street, corridor after corridor, until it pins the clandestine cabaret in its cross-hairs: a smoky cellar of jazz, gin, and guilty sweat where justice arrives in the form of a silk-stockinged fury. In the flicker of a single reel, matrimony becomes both farce and tribunal, the piano a confessional, the parrot a mocking Greek chorus, and the stylus a compass of retribution.