A simple little story in honor of the holiday.
April Fool
Ned lit up a cigar; it exploded. One of his teeth flew from his mouth and put the eye out of a man laughing hysterically at the other end of the room. Ned couldn’t help but laugh when the one-eyed man acquiesced to paying his dental bill without Ned even having to mention the word “litigation;” it was a word the man had already considered after being sent home once having the eye containing Ned’s tooth scraped out of his head. Ned, it seemed, had been an April victim, but not the fool of this prank.
The, now, one-eyed man had fancied himself something of an inventor, and after watching an old black-and-white movie mid-March, he figured he could put an old classic to practical use on the international day of jest. In, at least the cigar Ned had received, he clearly had over-shot the gun powder, and was more than a bit relieved that everyone else at the party had turned down the other cigars despite them all selling for more than five dollars a piece.
Three weeks after the party, an hour or two after writing Ned a check for the full amount of the dental work in relation to Ned’s front tooth, he sat before the New York Philharmonic’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture on PBS with a glass of scotch in one hand, and reached into his box of more-than-five dollar cigars with the other.
Even Ned did not laugh when he read the article on the front page of the town newspaper the next day. He just shook his head at the irony that the one-eyed man hadn’t thrown away the loaded cigars he had placed above the box of un-tampered cigars still unopened beneath it. The headline read, “Tragic April Fool,” and Ned was now grateful more so than ever that the fool never was he.
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