Now Hear This!

Mr. Westers is a rather mild-manered bank teller with a rather dull little life who one day decided to spice it up a bit by trying something new: hot hungarian gulash. Unfortunately for him, the gulash was not as mild as himself. Also, as the doctors later found out, Mr. Westers was allergic to any type of paprika. Lucky for him, that faithful day was the day he was going to be fired, as he was getting lazy and taking his sweet time handing his reports in. Lucky for him, because such bad news could've made him consider suicide as a way to "spice things up".

Jess was the woman Mr. Westers was happening to be seeing at the time. They have been dating for over five months and things were going rather dull, just the way he liked it. Jess had an apartment key by now, so she was the first to see him in this layabout state. At first she did not interfere with his head in the gulash bowl. You see, Mr. Westers was an olympic diver and professional scuba diver before he decided to join the exciting ranks of bank tellers. He could keep his breath under water for more than four minutes. Thus, Jess took this as a late-quarter-life crisis of his and thought Westers was just practicing as he did when they were in high-school. They went to "Gregory Peck High" who, ironically, was renowned only for his strong beliefs against paprika and all paprika-derived products. The two pursued different colleges and did not meet until fifteen years later, when he was buying a new bank-teller-like suit and Jess was begging outside the store, as part of a bet she lost with her friends. Or so she said. Mr. Westers never visited her at her job, so being a begger made sense. That would also explain the odd alley cat smell he could sometimes feel on her.

Jess was not a particularly smart woman (perhaps this is what led her to begging). This combined with Mr. Westers' thumbs up rigor mortis made her not question his newly found passion for gulash scuba diving. Only an hour later, after she had watched a whole ad-filled episode of "The young and the restless", when Jess returned to the kitchen to turn off the stove for the pasta she had prepared, had she noticed something was wrong.

-Oh my God!