Two is company and three is a crowd

Mr. Twomany was a very peculiar man. You cannot call him eccentric though because he wasn’t. But he was peculiar. Why was he so or how did he end up being so, out of the ordinary, no one knows. What I do know is what was it that made him peculiar and this is what I will be talking about.

The bitterness of coffee is what makes it different from other beverages. The sensation that it provides is what everyone is after. No one likes a sweet coffee. Mr. Twomany was such a man. He used to have exactly two cubes of sugar. Well this is not peculiar, is it? But he used to have two cubes of sugar no matter what the amount of coffee there used to be. You bring it to him in a small cup or in a jar if you will, no more than two cubes dear, was his reply. This was the case with everything. He would handle no more than two bills at one time, applaud no more than two claps, open no more than two letters at given moment, everything he did was in twos.

He used to get up in the morning at 5 on weekdays and 6 on Sundays and holidays and go for a stroll from his house to a lake situated near his house. He enjoyed the serenity. He loved nature because everything about nature was continuous and not discreet. One night he was woken up at around 12 by the bickering of the dogs outside. They were having a  heated discussion about which garbage dump was the best provider of quality food and no one was willing to come to a conclusion. Mr. Twomany tried everything possible to make his weariness cloud his hearing and make him go to sleep; but the fact that there were more than two dogs quarelling kept eating into his thoughts. He got up with a jolt and dashed outside in his black pyjamas towards the lake. He wanted the sanctity and he got it. One more thing he got was a chill piercing through the flesh, down to his bones. He had to return.

He was on his way back at a good pace. He neared his house but the heated discussion among the street dwellers had become even more intense. He got really angry and picked up a brick lying beside an under- construction building and tossed it at them and as peculiar as he was, went for the second. In his obsession for the second brick he had misdirected his first one onto the innocent looking window of the nearby jewellery store. The alarm went off and the police were quick to react. They caught the dumfounded man with the second brick in his hand and immediately escorted him to jail. The brick was intended to quiet the dogs and quiet them it did, indirectly. The dogs were as agile as they were loud and scattered off instantly, alarmed by the noise the alarm created, clearing the area for police to arrive.

He spent the night at the local police station, on the hard bed; devoid of the luxuries of the night. The next day he was presented in front of a very shrewd judge. His pleas went on deaf ears as he was caught red-handed. He was sentenced, on grounds of no previous misconduct, to imprisonment, for three years……