Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat by Roald Dahl is a short story about the dysfunctional relationship between Mr and Mrs Brixby, a couple who lived “in a smallish apartment somewhere in New York City.”
Once a month, Mrs Brixby goes to Baltimore where, under the excuse of visiting her “old aunt,” she cheats on her husband with a certain Colonel. Thinking of her lover, Mrs Brixby confesses that “The man had a way of making her feel that she was altogether a rather remarkable woman, a person of subtle and exotic talents, fascinating beyond measure…” In comparison, in her husband’s eyes, a dentist, she was “a sort of eternal patient, someone who dwelt in the waiting-room, silent among the magazines, seldom if ever nowadays to be called in to suffer the finicky precise ministrations of those clean pink hands.”
But when the Colonel decides not to see Mrs Brixby anymore and give her as a parting gift a very expensive mink coat, the readers get a better glimpse at who was actually deceiving who. If you want to find out, all you have to do is read the short story!
Roald Dhal was a British short story writer, novelist and screenwriter who was born in 1916. He died in 1990.
