Shred of Evidence

“…so Billy says, ‘But Mommy, I came straight home!’ Then in the next panel here he draws this dotted line showing all the places Billy went to on his way home! See, he stops at the playground, runs through the sprinkler over here, plays with a dog…” Ralph chuckled softly at the newspaper funny pages and wiped a small tear from the corner of his eye.

“Jesus Christ, it’s just ‘Family Circus’. He’s been doing that same dotted line joke for about a million years now.”

Ralph threw the newspaper on the floor of the cabin. “Well excuse me but I happen to think it’s cute.”

Toby shrugged and continued to scrub the floor. “To each his own. If you ask me, ‘Family Circus’ represents everything that’s gone wrong with the newspaper comics.”

“Why? What the hell is wrong with good old fashioned Christian values? When did that become a bad thing?”

“It’s just so hackneyed. What happened to the strips that pushed the boundaries and made you think? Stuff like ‘Pogo’ and ‘Bloom County?’”

“I never saw what was so great about ‘Bloom County’. The penguin guy was cute, though.” Ralph wiped a congealing red blob from another page. “How about ‘Ziggy’? Everybody loves ‘Ziggy!’”

“‘Ziggy’? You’re kidding, right? ‘Ziggy’ was a club-footed freak designed by a greeting card company.”

“You know what your problem is, Toby? You’re too damn cynical. Lighten up! Life is short, you need to learn to enjoy it.”

“Tell that to our pal on the floor, I’m sure he’d agree. Look, I’d love to continue this fascinating conversation but we gotta clean up and get the hell out of this dump.”

Ralph scanned the room with a critical eye, “The newspapers were supposed to catch most of the spray.”

“Well, they didn’t, did they? The shit went everywhere! There’s still a big ol’ chunk of brain under the ottoman. I’m not touching that. That’s all you, buddy.”

Ralph pulled the mop bucket over to the mess, nudging the corpse out of the way with his foot. Its shattered skull rolled lazily.

“If you had aimed the gun downward when you popped him, like I told you to do, this wouldn’t have happened. It’s all about trajectory.” Ralph got down on his hands and knees to gather up more newspaper, paused, then started to laugh again.

“What now?” Toby grunted.

Ralph held up another page of the paper, slimed with blood and gore. “Sorry but ‘Marmaduke’ cracks me up every time!”