Death in a saucebowl.

My ladylove and I have a pretty equitable system for chores. Not codified on paper anywhere, the rules have sort of evolved naturally over time. I'll even jump on the "green" fad and say it evolved "organically." How's that for using some lemming-like vernacular?

Since my wife's mutant power manifests in the form of Meganvision, a highly defined ability to see dust particles left behind by my mere mortal sweeping attempts, she gets to sweep. I generously fell on the garbage Seppuku sword since I prefer she not be hauling rotting garbage down 3 flights at night to a dumpster in an ill-lit city alley. We each wash our own clothes, asking nicely if we need to fill out a load if the other has some apparel they'd like to hitch a ride to cleantown. Cleaning the tub even has a ritual. I auger out the occasional hairball that breeds in the tub drain while she'll occasionally take care of the special cleaning our whirlpool tub requires. Overall our chore existence is pretty amicable. Now and again, however, evil strikes in the form of saucebowls.

Cleaning dishes has been the only area where we still have a back and forth relationship on who gets what and when. Generally we each keep up with loading our items into the dishwasher and running it. The real death to our matrimonial harmony comes when the saucebowls arrive. First you might see one or two. The lady will have some veggie potstickers and fill a side ramekin with some soy or other asiany-type sauce. I will maybe have some leftover chicken tenders and slam some BBQ sauce in a dipping bowl. Regardless of who starts the trend, we get overwhelmed by saucebowls. The things breed. Soon the sink has become a bio-weapons playground full of stagnant saucebowls all in varying stage of superflu petri-dish creation. Then the denial begins.

"I did dishes last."

"No, I did dishes last when I washed the thing near the thing after we went out to see the thing, remember?"

The argument starts off weak, then a few more days of fungal growth occurs in the dishes. Our yuck-pools have, by now, developed a latent early-evolutionary sentience and have begun plans for condo conquest. I'm not entirely certain if spores haven't been released into the air from the growths occuring in the sink, tainting our abilities to rationally just DO the damn dishes. Regardless of the cause, we begin to start targeting each other. Our dog becomes the intermediary for discussion as we refuse to directly tell the other person to do the dishes.

"Roxy, tell mommy it stinks in here from her stagnant saucebowls of death," I'll advise the dog.

"Roxy, tell daddy nothing smells worse than what comes out of his ass every 20 seconds," she'll inform the dog.

Eventually something snaps. Maybe the dog's boredom of our inanity does it. She'll go lick the floor somewhere more interesting. Maybe it's the fact that the other person disappears for a bit (usually the one who snaps does so when the other is working). Maybe God is a jester who has decided to get back to a normal show. Eventually one of us does the dishes. Someday, however, I know in my soul, the death of our marriage could lie in a saucebowl. This is why I'm plotting to accidentally drop all our saucebowls. It's for our love, honey!