Mother in law alone.
The cat was pretty much bald. There was only a small rectangular area, approximately an inch square on the upper right hind leg, that I had not yet shaved. As I looked upon it, razor in hand, I could not help a proud, satisfied smile from stretching across my face. This could possibly be the baldest yet, and my greatest achievement so far. I held the cat down firmly but comfortably with my left hand as I positioned the razor with my right, poised to take away the last sprouts of blue-grey fur. A hasty knock at the front door interrupted the final stage of my daily cat-shaving routine and my concentration was broken. I unhanded the cat. It stayed in position.

I rose to my feet and crossed the cluttered living room floor, taking care not to step on the many adult magazines and pregnancy publications that lay strewn across the threadbare carpet. Disgruntled and itchy, I opened the front door. There she was, my mother-in-law, Carol, clad entirely in black, just as she had been every day since my marriage to her daughter who had choked to death on a stray piece of confetti as we were leaving the registry office. I saw Carol maybe three times a year. She looked up at me with her sad, green eyes. The sense of suffering was almost palpable.
"I need it," she begged.
"Now is neither the time nor the place!" I announced defiantly.
"Forsooth!" she persisted. "Shalt thou not lend me thine shoulder that I may inhale thy sickly scent?"
I knew what she wanted. Even though her daughter's ashes had been scattered liberally around the Disney Store in Manchester's Arndale Centre almost three years previously, Carol still maintained that she could smell her on me.
"Carol," I pleaded. "Thou art mother in law and in law alone. Not in heart, nor mind, nor breast. Not in blood, nor milk, nor in the eyes of the Lord."
Carol would not be told. "But sire, I implore ye! Thou art my son in law and in deed, in memory and in soul. My need to smell the floral tones of my daughter's loins from the nape of thine waxy neck is volcanic in its magnitude and brutal in its dogged determination. I awake under moonlight, bile gargling like cold tea in the well of my parched throat. I retch in the darkness. I look down and my knees are like ruddy ears, laughing at my plight. My toes are in knots that shall take weeks to untangle. My shins hum with static, barking at one another. The sound is unbearable. My breasts kick angrily downwards at my thighs, while in between, my sweet vagina weeps..."

Carol went on like this for a while. When she had finished I couldn't think of an adequate retort so I yielded to her demands and invited her in. I sat playing Emlyn Hughes International Soccer on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum +3 for a couple of hours while she sniffed at my neck. "This should keep her going for a few more months," I thought to myself.
(stusut79, Tue 13 Sep 2005, 11:43, Reply)