A conversation

Unable to interrupt the tantrum the person was throwing on the other end of the call, Gail held her phone out at arm’s length. With the other hand, she folded down three fingers, forefinger to her temple, thumb cocked, then pulled the imaginary trigger. Making the most grotesque face she could, she fell to her couch in an emotive death scene worthy of an Oscar. She was grateful she was only talking to her mother and not Skyping.

She heard the other woman take a breath and jumped at the opening.

“Where on earth have you been getting your information? No, I have not quit my job. I have also not emptied my bank account, and I’m not planning to beg on the street in rags.”

Sitting on the edge of her couch, Gail covered her face with her gun hand, listening with growing frustration. Mouthing a silent, “Oh. My. God,” she attempted another pre-emptive strike.

“Mother, it’s only a Religious Studies discussion group. He’s the discussion leader, not some doddering old fool sitting in the corner drooling on himself.”

Flinging herself into the back cushions, Gail shook the phone in both hands, trying to strangle it in effigy.

“No, Mother we are not being forced to read subversive, anti-Christian text. We are reading the NIV Bible, the very one you gave me when I graduated high school. We take the Parables of Jesus and discuss how they would apply to contemporary situations.”

She was now thrusting a pretend knife into the phone’s screen, while eeking the theme music from “Psycho.”

“You do realize I am a grown woman, right? Living on my own, paying my own bills, making my own decisions. Yes, Mother even making my own wrong decisions.

“Tell you what, you get your Esther Circle to pray for us, then your conscious will be clear when we’re all damned to hell.”

Gail listened intently to her mother’s final words.

“I love you too, Mom.”

Trifecta, a weekly one-word prompt, challenges writers to use that word in its third definition form, using no less than 33 words or no more than 333. The week’s prompt is: Fool [noun \ˈfül\ 3  a : a harmlessly deranged person or one lacking in common powers of understanding]