Steam frosted my glasses as I stared down my adversary over the open door of the dishwasher. The lone fluorescent light revealed a scene both grisly and strangely familiar. It was late, too late for a girl like me to be in a neighborhood like this, on a night like this. Hell, I was scared - who wouldn’t be? - but I’d been through five years of dealing with the kind of diapers that’d make grown men cry, and lesser women run for their daddies. Armed with diamond-hardened steel nerves and a maniacal facial twitch, I tiptoed …..uhhh, I advanced on the mist-shrouded killer towering over me.

Upon wiping my glasses on my pj’s - I mean my Kevlar night camo - the cruel deception my foe perpetrated on me was undone. Hardly more than the size of a shriveled Fruit Loop, the demon before me nevertheless emanated a seething hatred flowing from its black core. Reinforced by a dried, crusty substance, I knew dislodging this fiend would be no easy task. Beyond the reach of any hard-edged utensils to aid me, I ’willed’ my courage into a hot, consuming ball of hatred. Ignoring the debilitating odor of day-old cereal, I made ready for the death blow that would send this creature back to the sewers where it belonged.

Honed by years of domestic combat skills, I executed a complex feint and parry maneuver designed to take the enemy out of his element. Undaunted by my childish antics, the one-eyed monster stared at me with contemptuous disregard. “You wanna go the hard way, you got it, you little milk-soaked button of a beast,” I said with a sneer and a spasmodic twitching in my eye. Having seen every Charlie’s Angels episode, I knew what to do next.

- Written by a sympathetic husband