T-Bolt Strikes Again!

Ben was inspecting his wrists objectively and I was fingering a cup of coffee. Outside, it was exterior, and the sun (to which we owe a good deal of heat) was doing the usual. Roughly around this time, the door (to which we owe our presence inside) decided it was going to open and reveal a familiar figure on the doorstep. It was an 8. We let it in and fed it a series of increasingly fattening courses, each of which began in Germany and ended in batter. When this post's namesake actually returned from a casual sex sabbatical, he was incensed to discover us courting a number which was reclining in his favourite chair indolently. This grew to wild fury when Hugh made a joke about exchanging telephone numbers, and he dived forward and tore the 8 in half, making two little zeros which scurried out of the room as quick as their shapes and the angle of the floor could roll them. Ironically, this created the perfect solution to the 8's unwillingness to choose between its hosts, so Ben and Hugh quickly ran after the zeros, leaving T-bolt alone with an empty room and half a dozen greasy plates.

When at last Ben and I returned, we found him slumped unconsciously over the table dressed in his familiar blue outfit and white cape. A gentle prod returned him to our world.
"Hugh?"
"Yes," I replied.
"Ben?"
"Yes."
Hugh thought it best to pat him gently on the skull, while I remained my usual self and refrained from any outward displays of affection.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"It's OK," reassured Ben.
"Yeah, don't worry," added Hugh.
There was a pause
"We understand," I said eventually.
T-bolt looked dolefully up at me and nodded his head.

Hugh and I spent the night having wild sex with the two zeros — in separate rooms, I might add. The zeros took the Jacuzzi. (Sound of drum and cymbal.) But seriously for a moment, we both ended up impregnating our halves of the 8, and soon our DNA was swimming inside two little half-human, half-half-eights, which were so repulsive and off-putting that they had to resort to incest to quench their desires for sex & companionship. T-Bolt, on the other hand, married something far less abstract than Ben and Hugh's spouses, and had something far less repulsive and far more human-looking than the numerical cross-breeds. But was I any happier? It's hard to say. Sure, I had a loving family, a cape and a hyphen in my Christian name, but was I truly happy? And isn't it weird thinking about what cavemen would do with umbilical chords? They probably wouldn't be able to tie them up properly like we do today, so they'd be walking around with this small bit of tube sticking out of their belly. Then again, I have no idea.

T-bolt spent the next sixty years of his life investigating what cavemen did with umbilical chords, and, in the process, neglected his family. In fact he neglected them to such an extent that he didn't even notice when they left him to live with Hugh and Ben and the zeros in their joint household. But when he finally found out what it was that primitive humans did with the tube that connects the abdomen of the foetus to the mother's placenta, he died a happy man.

One day, Hugh and his zero spouse were cutting up ingredients for a big salad when the knife slipped and severed two points on the right side of the zero's body. A piece fell out and turned the zero into more of an oddly shaped "C". Adding a syllable or two, Hugh finally settled upon a name for the zero after years of referring to her as "love", "dear" or, during arguments, "nothing". Ben, on the other hand, had christened his significant other early on, and he and Nicole (or "Early On", if you want to make that joke) have never looked back.

A fairly happy ending, then.