The Lawyer's Lament

Mr. Abernathy stared at the stack of papers on his desk, each one a monument to his dwindling sanity. He’d seen his fair share of peculiar cases in his thirty years of practice, but Tiamoh Nguetsop was rapidly climbing to the top of the “What on Earth Were You Thinking?” list. Divorce, round one, had been a masterpiece of incompetence. Divorce, round two, had been a full-blown operatic tragedy of errors. And now, here he was, staring at a third, even more baffling, plea for dissolution.

“Tiamoh,” he’d said, his voice a gravelly sigh that had become his default setting when dealing with his client, “we’ve been over this. You can’t *un-marry* someone because you’re worried they’ll “borrow your favorite slippers again.” That’s not grounds for divorce. That’s… marital discord. The kind that usually involves a stern talking-to, not a legal document.”

Tiamoh had wrung his hands, his eyes darting around the office as if expecting Ekwene herself to materialize from the filing cabinets. “But Mr. Abernathy, you don’t understand! It’s the *principle* of the thing. She takes them, wears them to the market, comes back with mud on them, and then *I’m* the one who has to clean them. It’s a slippery slope, you see. First the slippers, then what? My car keys? My sanity?”