Saturday: An Ottawa Story - Twelve

12.

Dinner had just taken a potentially disastrous turn, although only one of its five participants were aware of this fact.

As well, "just" was debatable, as David was certain the stimulant now coursing through Richard's body like cholesterol in a fat guy's bloodstream had almost certainly been in the man's system for an hour. To add insult to injury, its effects were so glaringly obvious David was shocked he hadn't noticed it until mere seconds ago. Richard's face was flush, his cheeks flooding with red and sweat beading on his brow, and his friend thought it very unlikely that the paprika Alex had sprinkled over the potatoes could provoke such a physical reaction.

Saturday: An Ottawa Story - Eleven

11.

A brief introduction to Alex's sisters:

Alex's parents, the Prochnows, were an active couple, and fertile to say the least, the three girls having each been born within a year of one another. David's late in-laws were also quite insane--or so Alex had deduced in her early teens, noticing the painfully alliterative similarity between her name and those of her sisters, Alice and Alyssa. 

Taken by themselves, these monikers were mundane, even pretty. But with the three sisters a grade apart in that acme of  childhood cruelty known as elementary school, Alex quickly realized it probably wasn't a good idea to name one's children after reading a baby names book on acid which, she also deduced, her parents very likely did.

Saturday: An Ottawa Story - Ten

Evening

10.

In and around 5PM David descended the basement stairs to find Richard tooling around at the computer, his leg jiggling as though it belonged to a rabbit with ADHD. The wayward schoolteacher had multiple tabs open on the web browser, alternating between flipping through Facebook, performing various Google searches of--David hoped--an innocent nature and, oddly, looking at a long-range weather forecast. He turned with a start as one of the lower stairs creaked with David's weight.