A Man Without

This is a snippet from a short story in progress. Enjoy.

[….“I have never diddled my housekeeper,” he stressed, answering the prosecutor’s accusation. “I’m diddle-less,” he continued. “Maybe that’s who Daedalus was,” he teased with the homophone – “a man whose name we still don’t know – simply an unnamed man, and like me – a man without a diddle.”

In the gallery of onlookers and gawkers for this high-profile trial, one disembodied voice whispered, too loud, to another, “Ohhhh! He doesn’t have a diddle!” The whole courtroom laughed….. Even the judge laughed hard as he struggled to say, “I am NOT a man without a didd – I mean a gavel ……now order!” That just made it worse. Two more rounds of banging the judicial hammer finally restored decorum, but for the rest of the day, every witness’s testimony was peppered by spontaneous and contagious diddle-chuckles.] – AB