The Blame Game

Bill and Phil are twins. 300-word flash

The Blame Game

“You always get us in trouble!”
“Who me?”
“Humph!”
The wrangling went on between Bill and Phil, who were twins, for some time.
“Why are you always blaming me?”
“Because it’s always you, Phillip!”
“Name one time I stirred up trouble for us.”

Bill sat thinking for a while in his punishment corner. He turned to Phil in the diagonally opposite corner and shouted: “What about the time…”
“That was your idea, remember?”
“What about when we…”
“You made me do it.”
“I never make you do anything; I merely persuade you.”
“You call a noogie persuasion?”
“I never resort to violence!”
Bill subsided, silently fuming.

“I still say it ends up being you that gets us into the most trouble,” Phil concluded.
“Name one time I got us into trouble?”
We were at the swimming hole, and you dared me to jump straight down.”
“A dare is only a suggestion,” Bill said.
“Not when all the other boys hear you, it’s a direct challenge.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one. But that’s only a single time.”
“But because I nearly drowned, we were grounded for a month in the middle of summer!”
“Yeah, I remember how we sweated and whined until we got out the slip and slide and cooled off that way. Most of the guys came to our house after that.”
Phil snuck over with his chair to Bill’s corner. Soon they were giggling and laughing together.
“I tell you what, next time I try to get us in trouble, feel free to tell me you don’t want to.”
“Mostly it ends up being fun, so how can I do that?”
“Well, there is that,” Phil conceded.
Bill and Phil were having such a good time in time-out, their mom decided to cancel it.