“What is it, hun?” I ask. “We’re almost late for work.”

“What work?” she asks, rolling over and pulling the blanket over her head.

I pull the blanket away from her… gently. And gently is the operative term here.

I’m quite afraid of my wife. Terrified, as a matter of fact. Several things — well, more than several, actually — can trigger her to make my life hell. I don’t consider them major things, but I wouldn’t say that to her face.

I once left a plate on the table and walked outside when someone knocked on the door. When I came back, my plate was floating in soap water in the washing basin.

“Why did you do that?” I asked… gently.

“We don’t leave plates on the table in this house,” she answered, not quite so gently. “You know that, Makini.”

“I wasn’t done. There was food still on the plate.”

“Still…”

“Somebody knocked on the door. I had to answer.”

That’s when I got “the look”. It’s this thing where she stares at me without blinking, her eyes promising to do all sorts of nasty things to me.

It’s usually followed by the dreaded phenomenon called “the silent treatment”. This is where she goes for hours at a time (one time almost two entire days) not speaking to me. She would make food and plonk it on the table without a word.

One night amid the last such impasse, we made love nonetheless. Frankly, I have no idea how it came about, and it will forever remain one of the greatest mysteries of our marriage.

On the lighter side, it amuses me to this day that the end of the silent treatment was brought about by a spider.

Yep. If you’ve been with me a while, you then know that my wife will tackle a 150kg rugby player or walk comfortably into a shootout with Wanugu-level bank robbers, but the sight of the tiniest spider sends her into absolute panic.

I guess now I know how to get her talking the next time it happens.

So, I peel the blanket gently away from my wife and remind her she’s a law enforcement officer in the tiny village of Jiji Ndogo.

“Are we really that necessary?” she asks sleepily.

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, think about it really. Policing creates, rather than reduces, danger. Think of the maandamanos in Nairobi. If the police weren’t present…”

“Then there would have been rampant looting and chaos.”

“But those looters aren’t genuine picketers, are they? Who knows, maybe the crowd would police itself.”

Knowing her previous zeal for her work, I’m now beginning to get extremely worried for her. “Honey, people cannot police themselves. Do you know what happened when we were in Mombasa for the police conference?”

“I was kidnapped by bad cops?”

I swallow hard. Maybe I walked right into that one. “I mean here, when weren’t present. Someone tried to rob Mla Chake shop using fake gun made from a banana wrapped in insulating tape. C’mon, hun, what’s the real issue here?”

She sits up straight and casts eye daggers my way. “Oh, so there have to be other issues? I can’t just be a person who woke up to the fact that policing has taken a nosedive and we’re putting even innocent people in prison?”

Nodding, I say, “Oh, now I see. You spend two months in prison and cops are the bad guys.”

It’s going on two days of silence now since we spoke that morning.