Death by tabasco

I had a novel concept for a mystery story today. Death by tabasco.

Have you ever had one of those days when you are coasting along without a concern. The weather is unseasonably warm and sunny. Most of your business is going in a positive direction. Your wife is happy, you are eating lunch with her at her place of business. Everyone seems to be happy with you. The old blue bird of happiness is circling your head.

Then the slight paper cut you had noticed last evening but forgot over night catches a drop of tabasco sauce from your lunch and sends your central nervous system into intense shivers? Happened to me today. Eating lunch with Cindy, drizzling tabasco sauce on the bun of my chik filet sandwich. Picked up the bun to drop it on my sandwich, then the sauce interacted with the cut.

Fireworks. Waves crashing on the rocky shoreline. Birds flying off in every direction. Shoulders soaring into the air. Feet leaving the floor. Eyes searching the ceiling tiles above you, trying to discern the cause of the sensation. Then you realize: tabasco sauce.

It occurs to you that death by tabasco sauce is a silly way to die. What would Agatha Christie say? I drive home and sit in my house and I consider multiple scenarios in which intruders enter my house and take my life in various ways, for various reasons. A story in every room. But tabasco sauce?

The brain is a fragile thing. Thirty minutes later, you are home. You brush your teeth and you remove your glasses and try to insert your contact lens into your right eye. As you reach for the left lens, your right eye reminds you of the tabasco sauce on your fingers. Quickly, you take the right lens out and try to wipe it clean with saline solution. As you work the salty water into the high polymer plastic, trying to remove the sauce, you realize that it will probably retain sufficient traces of tabasco. Do you really want to do that all over again?

So you learn your lesson and you remove your lenses and you stick your glasses on your face. Glasses never burned your eyes. Glasses perform the necessary correction to your eyesight. Perhaps its time for an old-school solution to vision correction.

So I am wearing my glasses this afternoon. End of lessons.