He had come in from the cold, red and lugubrious, hung over from too much to drink in the swamp of bug juice or spider nectar, and he lay down before his wife, the old brown crow, who had stayed up past her bed time and stared deep into the darkness though she was truly blind as a bat, because her no-good, thoughtless excuse of a husband had found favor in the brewery of some young bitch or some fierce feline, and for this she had given up her rightful place in her family’s murder’s row, kept tight together in the dark and cold and lack of light, but no, she had to fall in love with the honeyed tongue of the one-eyed varmint called Mister Toad, who years removed was no longer the charmer she recalled, but a burden whom she supported in her daily sweeps in and about the waterways and gulleys, pulling earthworms and beetles and crickets and grasshoppers, munching and taking in her share before collecting his and bringing it home before he had risen from his nightly debaucheries, and leaving it on the table with hair of a dog and snippet of a cat, both as elixirs and warnings of worse things to come, if he didn’t mend his ways, and he always had a tear in his eye, declaring his love and repenting from his wicked ways, but giggling half way through and taking in her curses and threats to eat him from head to toe, without touching his precious poisoned organs, “No kidney will do me in,” she added to the list, before she too broke into huffs and puffs of laughter, and they took their amusement, like Strauss and Pauline, to the bedroom, to renew their marriage vows once again.