An ex-millionaire

A man spoke in a loud voice at the end of the MTR train. He walked from carriage to carriage, asking the passengers a question one by one. His question was, ‘How much money is a lot for you?’ Some of the passengers held their heads down, or pretended to be sleeping. Some walked to the other carriages. The man was in his early thirties and plump. His shirt was hanging out, so his gut was faintly visible. 

The train began to fill with people and he had to stay in one place.  So he started asking the same question to the people around him. Since nobody answered, he started to talk to himself. He clearly believed he had won the Mark Six at some time, and on this theme he rambled on from one subject to another: his manager had upset him by asking him to pay attention to his work instead of the Mark Six prize money; his landlord had asked him to find money to pay his rent if he wasn’t going to win the mark six again; if he was rich, his friends would not criticise his ideas and personality; he had given one or two million dollars to his father, but his father had spent it all; he shouldn’t have listened to his father’s advice, he should have bought a house rather than putting the money in the bank; he had won nothing on the Mark Six since 2009.

He must have won several million dollars on the Mark Six, but he was young, so he can’t have managed his money very well or else he had wasted it. Whatever, there was nothing left. Maybe he thought he could win the money again rather than using his hands to make his millions.

A review of Lamb to the Slaughter

A happily married housewife, Mary Maloney, is six months pregnant and is waiting for her husband to come home from work. When he arrives, to her horror, he wants to get a divorce. Stunned, she takes a leg of lamb from the freezer, telling him there is lamb for dinner. He stands with his back to her, and tells her he is going out. She hits him over the head with the leg of lamb and kills him. Then she puts the lamb in the oven and turns it on, calms down and goes to a shop to buy vegetables. When she returns, she cries over her husband’s body and calls the police. The police search the flat for a murder weapon until late at night. When they are tired and hungry, Mary offers them the lamb for dinner.

The story is short and simple, but has an amusing twist at the end of it. Also, Mary is an unexpected character. At the beginning of the story, the couple seem to love each other, but the wife is betrayed and left by the man she trusts. And, the pregnant woman moves slowly, but she has the strength to kill her man. While she is sobbing, she waits for an opportunity to tell the police to eat the leg of lamb, the weapon. At the end of the story, she sniggers because her improvised audacious plan has worked.