No Strings Attached: Sleeping In

where Mr. Blavitt lived.

The deposit was paid and the men in their trucks and saws and jacks and blocks and chains and winches arrived. They cut the front section off the house, with the front door and the windows, and carted it away, then they took the middle pieces out, with the bath-room, living-room, stairs and sun-room, and carted them down the winding road, very much like ants as they dissect a leave. Mr. Blavitt stood nearby and watched the progress with great satisfaction, but, as you know, the path of life seldom runs smoothly, and so, before the sun went down that day, Mr. Blavitt was dead.

Heart-attack, the doctors said, or something similar.

But now the carters-of-houses had a problem. They were not too pleased with Mr. Blavitt for dying before the job was finished, and they were rather annoyed because they had not been paid for the whole job. The lawyers tried to explain things to them, and many words were spoken and typed, in triplicate, so all those involved could read them, and the lawyers would be paid a lot more for their hard typing, but no money appeared, so the workers-who-slice-houses-like-melons got in their trucks and drove away.

The funeral went very well, and a small crowd of hungry guests helped clean up the food at the reception afterwards, then the matter of the pieces of the house came up and several bright-eyed real estate agents suggested that they try to sell the pieces for whatever they could get. The lawyers were consulted, the will forgotten, and the bidding began the next day.

A collector of pieces of houses paid a paltry sum, which means very small and has nothing to do with hens or chickens, for Mr. Blavitt's jumble and also paid a deposit to the men-who-chop-houses-up so they could transport the bits to a new site. They drove their trucks about, looking terribly serious, and squinting in the sun, or rolling little stubby cigarettes, or saying coarse, dirty things to each other, until most of the pieces of the house were set up on blocks of wood in a paddock beside a main road. Even the back of the house was brought down from the farm in the hills and placed in the correct position. The collector of pieces of houses put a big sign beside the road, advertising the pieces of house to whoever might want to buy them, then he went across the paddock to his house and sat down in his formica and linoleum kitchen to have a cup of tea.

But as he dunked his third flimsy, white, and hardly nutritious biscuit, he was bitten by a very large, and very rare spider. He died before he reached the hospital.

Meanwhile, out in the paddock, on the very night that