It was only 10:32 in the morning and Peter Mayhew had the rest of the day free for whatever struck his fancy. He’d spent the morning dutifully attending to his domestic responsibilities: dishes and laundry. The floors were already clean but Peter took the Smiffer Wet Jet on a tour of the house. He enjoyed pretending like he was in an 80s music video while cleaning the floors, dancing and singing to a non-existent camera that followed him from room to room. He took a refreshing shower, having worked up a sweat from cleaning, and performed his daily skin care routine - completing his to-do list for the day.

His fancy, for the moment, was the intricate process of building a self-sustaining ecosystem within a bottle.

Putting together a terrarium was something he’d been interested in trying for some years, but other hobbies and interests continued passing the project on Peter’s erratic priority list. Until today.

Fresh from the shower, he sat on the couch in the front room of the squeaky clean home that he shared with his wife, Renea, and their dog - a geriatric corgi named Flapjack. The bottle, a tiny, round clear-glass container that was nearly too small for the task for which it was purchased, sat on the coffee table before him next to the myriad of materials that would make up the ecosystem. Peter imagined the completed terrarium, a beautiful little globe of life contained within a sealed space. It would look great as the centerpiece of his coffee table when he was done.

Most of what Peter needed for the tiny biosphere, he’d pulled out of his own backyard: small stones that would line the bottom and provide water drainage, soil, tiny patches of moss that he would place artfully throughout, and various other miniscule plant species he found while poking around the yard. Some items, namely the bugs that were vital to a closed terrarium, he’d had to order online. Finally, every piece was acquired, organized, and ready to go into the bottle.

Flapjack was snoring at irregular intervals. He was lying on his side, twitching and yipping softly occasionally, between Peter’s feet and the darkwood coffee table. The heavy rain outside caused a soothing but rapid pit pat which served to intensify Peter’s focus. As he so often did, Peter Mayhew fell into a hyper-focused trance as he worked. Peter got to it, inserting each material slowly and carefully with a pair of long thin tweezers.

It was delicate work, each piece required purposeful placement within the small area, and Peter lost himself to it. A larger rock here to give Peter’s tiny world its first mountain. A patch of jade green moss there, or perhaps there, to highlight the pink petals of a miniscule flower. Darker patches of moss to imitate a dense evergreen forest on his tiny mountain, and so on.

Scrunching up his nose, Peter plucked the final entry before this world would be sealed from the coffee table: bugs. In addition to all things dirty, Peter despised all things icky. Bugs, even tiny, barely visible to the human eye bugs, were firmly in that category. When he’d learned about the microscopic bugs living on human’s eyelids, Peter nearly threw up. He’d wanted to tear his own eyelids off, or spray them with bleach and scrub them with steel wool. Something, anything to be rid of them. Since then, he’d purposefully ‘forgotten’ that they exist. Peter turned the little yellow jar around in his hands to reread the instructions, even though the paragraph of text essentially boiled down to: open the jar and dump the bugs into their new habitat.

He was stalling.

Peter took a deep breath, ready to open the jar and pour with all possible speed, but the alarm he’d set on his phone began beeping urgently. It shook the coffee table with its vibrations. He set down the bugs, squeezing his eyes shut in silent frustration.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Not today,” Peter said weakly, jumping to his feet; nearly-finished terrarium forgotten. “Not today, not today…”

Peter’s vocal chagrin woke Flapjack. The old boy got up slowly, groaning with the effort, and then left the living room to continue his nap somewhere less noisy.

Peter lost track of time often, especially when absorbed in his current obsession. Whatever that may be at any given time. It was often inconvenient for the people around him, and he knew it was a major failing of his. His solution was to set alarms on his phone when he couldn’t afford to lose track of time. Unfortunately, the alarm that had just gone off was the third one he set for himself this afternoon.

Last call.

Peter jumped over the couch, one hand planted on its back for leverage, and hurried into the kitchen. He pulled a wine glass from the cabinet, set it on the counter, and started wildly searching for the bottle of wine he was sure he’d picked up at the store yesterday. He found it right where it should be: on the wine rack on the kitchen counter. He corked it and began to pour.

Renea had been having one of those days at work, if her periodic check-in texts were anything to go on. Greeting her with a kiss and a glass of wine had proved vital to achieving a pleasant evening in the past and he was banking on that same magic keeping him from an entire night of rage-ranting.

Renea was the head of administration for a large corporation in the healthcare industry. A high powered, incredibly competent woman, she’d been promoted time and time again; an even more impressive feat considering she held no college degree. She made her way to the top with nothing but her ability to solve problems, create efficient standard operating procedures, and a flawless track record of excellence.

The bad bit about making it to the top, though, especially in a sterile corporate environment, was that the interoffice politics could get a bit nasty. Another department head, Kinsey Fox, had made it her personal mission to make Renea’s life harder than it really had to be. That’s how Renea made it sound, at least. Peter was sure the story would differ based on who told it but, regardless of the ‘truth’ of any situation, he was the kind of man to completely support his wife in any and everything.

Peter finished pouring the wine just as Renea pulled into the drive. He frowned. He’d forgotten something, he was sure of it. The wine and the kiss would just have to do.

Moving quickly, Peter slid across the sparkling clean wood floor out of the hallway and into the front room as his wife opened the door. Renea’s shoulder length black hair was soaked through, sticking to her once-crisply-ironed white button up shirt. The blouse was now nearly transparent - her black bra clearly visible beneath. When she looked up to see Peter slide into view wearing nothing but a pair of white calf-high socks, a glass of wine held auspiciously in one hand, her stress-frown began to melt.

First it was her eyes. Her obvious fondness and amusement was clear in those sparkling blue orbs. Next came her lips. A playful little smile formed at the corners of her mouth, widening as her brows raised. And last, the tilt of her head. A loving wife endeared to her eccentric, naked, husband.

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“You’re home! I thought you were never coming back,” Peter said, extending the wine for her. She accepted it gratefully.

“You say that every day,” she said, leaning forward eagerly for the kiss that Peter gave her when she returned form work each evening.

“Eeee!” Peter shrieked when her cold, wet hair slapped his bare chest. He stepped back, assessing her for a moment. “You just, you know, do your thing. Free the boobs. Drink the wine. I’ll be right back with a towel, a dry shirt, and sweatpants.”

“Peter,” she called after him, smiling sweetly. “Maybe get yourself some pants, too?”

Peter stopped, brows furrowed and head cocked to the side as he looked back at her. And then he looked down at himself. He was, indeed, not wearing pants. Or anything apart from his socks. He’d been researching terrarium specifics while getting dressed after his shower. He must have been too absorbed in the content and forgotten to finish dressing himself. Again.

When he returned, now clothed, with the towel and a change of clothes for Renea he was surprised to see that she hadn’t moved a single inch from where he’d left her. She was just staring blank-eyed into space, looking defeated. She hadn’t even had a sip of her wine. This scenario struck Peter as odd for a number of reasons.

First was the fact that, like all women forced into the contraptions by a patriarchal society and professional work environment, the first thing Renea did when she got home each evening was to take off her bra.

Peter’s next clue was that she was not tapping frantically away at her ever present mobile phone. Peter was concerned. She had messaged him throughout the day, telling him about Kinsey Fox’s most recent atrocities, but the way she just stood there looking like the oldest child at an orphanage, the one that knew it would never be adopted, let Peter know he had yet to hear the whole story.

Peter placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. Renea’s eyes jumped into focus, coming back to the here and now with visible effort.

“Come on,” Peter said softly. “Let’s get you out of that bra. Then I want to hear all about whatever nonsense the pitwolf pulled this time.”

He folded the towel and sweatpants over one arm and took her glass of wine with the other, setting it down on the end table next to Renea’s car keys. Suddenly she was on him, arms wrapped around his neck, hugging him with all of the strength her tiny body had to offer.

“I love you so much,” she squeaked, sobbing softly. “I don’t know how I would get through a single day without you, Peter.”

Peter smiled down as she leaned back, arms still around his neck, to look up at him. He smiled down warmly. “You’ll never have to, lady pants.”

“Oh!” Renea said excitedly. She began unbuttoning her shirt as she went on. “Did I tell you Nichelle started calling Kinsey ‘the pitwolf’, too?”

Peter barked a laugh as he accepted the soaked white blouse. “No way.”

“She did! I was sharing my screen with her the other day and your message popped up. It said something about the pitwolf going on a rampage. At first Niche thought you were talking about Flapjack, and she was like, ‘isn’t Flapjack a two-hundred-year-old corgi?’ and I had to explain that the pitwolf was not Flapjack. Anyway, long story short, Niche is now using your pet name for Kinsey.”

“Good, good, a recruit,” Peter said, eyes glossing over as he considered the implications. He looked up sharply, eyes gleaming with a newfound ambition. “Together we will recruit an army and dethrone the loathsome pitwolf. Our uprising will be swift!”

Comfortably dressed and sitting together on their couch, Renea looked longingly at the glass of wine Peter had set on the end table so very far away.

“I’ll get it,” Peter offered.

“No,” Renea said, stopping him from standing by throwing her entire torso into his lap. She reached around the couch to the side table, opened its lower cabinet, and then rummaged loudly around inside with her legs flailing behind for balance. Sighing, Peter put a steadying hand on her leg. She returned to a normal, very human, sitting position with two glasses and a bottle of very expensive whiskey. She looked at Peter with a sheepish smile. “Drink?”

Peter winced. “That bad, huh?”

Renea nodded seriously while pouring two glasses of whiskey. Peter accepted and began swirling it around as he watched her down the contents of her glass in a single go. She poured another, the corners of her lips and one eye all twitching slightly.

“Tell me.”

She took another drink, this time without emptying the entire glass.

“So…” she began.

Peter listened patiently as Renea recounted what he could only imagine was every single thing that had happened to her over the course of the entire day. In detail. When she brought up hearing from a coworker that the pitwolf herself, Kinsey Fox, was reportedly banging the company’s COO, he leaned forward with excitement. The only drama in Peter’s entire existence made it home and was recounted second hand. As a result, he knew more dirty secrets about most of Renea’s coworkers than their spouses did. Renea, unfortunately, had very little in the way of juicy details on this particular matter. She did, however, finally get to the reason for her sour mood.

“Then she acts all high and mighty blaming it all on administration!”

“She didn’t,” Peter whispered in disbelief, eyes wide. One hand came up to cover his mouth.

“She did!” Renea shouted, words slurring just a touch after that fifth, or perhaps sixth glass of whiskey.

She slammed her empty glass onto the coffee table and refilled it, spilling a healthy amount that Peter would wipe up in the morning. He didn’t mind keeping the house in order in the slightest. He’d always been a tidy person and, since becoming a stay-at-home husband, his duties were accepted with… if not enthusiasm, a healthy sense of responsibility. And there was a certain satisfaction in vanquishing germs from their domicile.

Apparently the pitwolf had been ignoring deadlines on some new business objective. OUGPT, the corporation she and Renea both worked for, was always pushing some new metric, buzzword, or business practice. Kinsey probably figured it’d be forgotten, replaced by whatever new thing the company pushed next, and hadn’t complied. When the brass came down on her, she’d claimed that Renea’s department, administration, had dropped the ball on ‘completing the ask’ - one of a handful of buzzwords currently in circulation among the executives.

“But they don’t actually believe her, right? Like, have you ever dropped the ball before? On anything?”

“I did some smooth talking, but they still initiated an audit of my entire department’s tasking process.”

“Wow.” Peter scratched at his chin thoughtfully. “Well the good news is that any audit of your department’s only going to make you look better.”

“Doesn’t make it less insulting. Or any less of a pain in my ass.”

Renea’s rant was beginning to wind down, and she was beginning to get a bit sloppy from the whiskey. When she finally tuckered herself out, Peter carried her to their bed, tucked her in, and kissed her sweetly on the forehead. He snuck out of the bedroom on tiptoes, and made his way to the home office. Renea’s birthday was this coming weekend and he had just come up with a brilliant idea for her present.

The home office did have two computers, though Peter’s was only used on occasion. They’d purchased it so that, when Renea worked from home, he could spend some time with her. His following obsession, a rather noisy video game, resulted in the decision to outlaw video games from the office. Since then he’d really only used the computer for occasional research projects. Tonight, he used it to post an ad to Gregslist.

Paying well for experienced werewolf hunter

My wife’s coworker has shown clear signs that she is, in fact, a werewolf. This presents a danger to the world, as well as my wife’s zoom meetings. This threat to all civilized people must be dealt with most promptly.

Please submit any relevant experience and time availability to my email: [email protected]

His master plan for Renea’s birthday gift was to compile the strangest replies to this ad, then printing and framing them to present. Gregslist was the internet’s greatest treasure, as well as its darkest corner. Even posting something as simple as a request for lawn care could result in unsolicited dick pics and princes from Somalia who need only your credit card number to get home, where they could send you their vast fortune as a reward. A post like this one, Peter was sure, would produce some very interesting and, ideally, amusing email inquiries. He turned off the computer, took Flapjack out for one last potty, and went to bed with high hopes.

For the first time in recent memory, Peter could not wait to check his email the following morning.