Janine had called Cynthia some twenty minutes earlier and asked her come over without saying why. When she'd gotten no answer to her knocks on the door, she had tried the knob, found it unlocked, and let herself in. Inside was Janine, sitting on the bottom step of the huge, ugly staircase with her elbows on her knees, head cupped in her hands, deep in thought.          Cynthia surveyed the scene and said, "I like what you've done with the place. New Belgian area rug, sofa nearer the fireplace. But the dead husband doesn't really go with anything in the room."          Janine threw her a sour look. "Right now I need smart, not smart-ass, Cyn. I've been trying to decide what I ought to do now." She shot a sidelong glance at her erstwhile husband and added, "You know, it wasn't an accident. I killed him."          Cynthia sat beside her and took the hand nearest her. "I figured."          "You did?"          "I'm your best friend, Jan. I know things nobody else knows. I know the picture of your marriage George was careful to paint to the community and your friends, and I know the way it was. I would have killed the sonofabitch years ago...no offense...so I just assumed––"          "Oh."          They sat in silence for for half a minute, then Cynthia asked, "What made you finally decide to do it, anyway?"          "I found him here with that bitch Elizabeth from the tennis club. In flagrante delicto, as they say. I told you about it."          "Elizabeth Horton, sure. Mattress of the rich and famous."          "That was just the latest, of course. You know about most of the rest. But it was this one that put me over the top, made me actually, truly want him dead.          "The funny thing is that I didn't have the slightest thought of killing him till about five seconds before it happened. The slightest new thought, anyway."          Cynthia patted her hand and said, "I'm going to need you to run all that by me again, hon."          "Well, what I mean is, after I caught them––him and Elizabeth Horton––I thought about it all day long, all kinds of ways to murder him in more and more grisly ways, but none of them seemed very surefire. I found myself in the same pickle as I suppose are other people who've never killed anyone before and would never kill anyone again but want quite badly to kill one person right now. I was afraid to do it because I figured I'd mess it up somehow like we all mess up some part of most things we do for the first time, the way nobody's very first pancake turns out right. You understand?"          "About as well as I'm likely to. Shoot."          "Okay, so I let it go, no harm done, and basically forgot about it. Until I was following him from the bedroom suite to the top of that ridiculous staircase.  In those few seconds, it came to me all at once from the ether in a flash of clarity, full-blown: why not just push him down it right here, right now? It would be just the two of us here when it happened, so who was to say he did anything but trip over his own big feet…certainly, at worst, there was no way on earth to prove that that wasn't what happened. So…."          Cynthia looked over at what was left of what had been George and said, "So that's what you did."          "That's what I did."          Cynthia nodded once. "Good for you." She got up, walked to the knurled end of the opposite banister, and leaned against it. "What now?"          "I don't know. I didn't plan it, so there was obviously no plan for its aftermath. I was hoping you could help me. Right now I'm just sitting here spinning my wheels."          "Well, the obvious first step is him," said Cynthia. "He's not going to look any better the longer you leave him there, you know."          "No, I suppose not," Janine allowed. She thought for a moment and added, "It's been long enough now, don't you think?"          "More than enough."          Janine got up and walked over to the hearth. "George, I believe it's time to move on from the 'I have to have him near me' part to the 'I just couldn't bear to look at him anymore without missing him oh so terribly' part of the grieving process." Cynthia watched approvingly as Janine lifted off the lid, took the urn from atop the mantel where it had perched for the last two months following George's tragic staircase mishap, and poured the ashes onto the shimmering embers of the fire.      Placed in the public domain in July 2009 by the author, Jack Hardway