"Napoleon Bonaparte"

I  rid the house of the firearms - the Remington shotgun and the two pistols, one of them an antique Colt 45 that hadn't been fired in over 50 years, but I figured it could still be fired, so out it went.  Maybe that was a mistake, out here in the country where we have wild life - foxes, wild cats that we call pumas, and the folks I work with in the city call mountain lions, rats of course, some say wolves, but I'd sooner believe in werewolves than in the presence wolves around these parts.  One hundred years ago outlaws wandered these roads, today the only outlaws are people in nearby towns who build additions to their houses  unapproved by the county. Still, I haven't fired any of these weapons for thirty years except at the county shooting range in the hills, and I don't expect that I would have to fire them in the future.

But a house with a half crazy woman is better off without firearms tempting her overheated emotions during one of her periodic moods of explosive rage.  "Why don't you just divorce her and move out?" asked a neighbour, one of the handful of people aware of my domestic situation.  I would, but then I'd lose my job with the church in the city.  The church wants me married, what can I say.  They know nothing about what's been happening here, except that the children had grown and moved out, and our family never much associated socially with my bosses or co-workers, the distance from the city being one of the reasons.  So I'm sticking around.

"What are you scribbling this time?" she asked "Another story about guns for the slush pile at the New Yorker?"

"Yeah, another one about guns," I admitted, "Absent guns. For the collection".

She liked to tease me about the New Yorker, which printed one of my stories, and rejected six others.  Or was it seven? That single success opened a door  for me to the publishing world, and I was now completing another story for a collection to be printed next year, while I continued to struggle writing and re-writing  my Great novel.

She laughed.
"You always think about guns even absent ones."

"I don't always think about guns any more than Napoleon Bonaparte always thought about guns," I retorted.

"Do you know what Anton Chekhov said about guns?"

"No, what did he say?"  If anyone knew, she would with her degree in Russian literature, and her job at the University.

She said it in Russian, and translated into English "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it."

"Really?" I said, pretending I hadn't heard the quote or its variants before.

At that moment we heard a loud explosion outside, like cannon fire. It was the city garbage truck paying our apartment complex a Saturday morning visit.   The racket would last for another half hour as the truck proceeded to empty, load and compress the contents of all the garbage chutes of our  block.  I slipped on my sneakers, closed the door behind me, took the elevator down and walked to the cafe down the street.