Chapter Ninety-Four
Rumble, rumble.
The rocket burners that were Crackers’ purring mechanism increased in volume as she pressed a delicate velvety paw on my esophagus. I figured she was trying to nest down deep under the covers in memory of her kitten days. Then I got – to her credit – a timid whap on the head, producing more electric sparks in the dark. Then another one. Clearly. Someone had not yet been fed breakfast.
Somewhere, a tree had fallen in a forest and no one heard it. Or rather, a green plant in a box in the library. Crackers trailed tell-tail greenery into the living room, and I knew the plant had seen its final hour. As had The Bear’s desk, ravaged with black soil.
Clink, clink.
“What’s going on in there, Puck?”
“I’m doin’ an experiment, Mom.”
I quickly signed up as his assistant. Food coloring in water. Safe enough.
“And now – an egg.”
“Alright. You may dye one egg…”
“And a little salt! I will measure it!… Soap, too. How about a PEZ?… An orange now?”
I drew the line at an orange. But I couldn’t stop him before a handful of cat food when it there too. He looked triumphantly at me…
“I call this CAT FOOD BEER!”
“You can’t talk about beer. You don’t even know what that is.”
“Well, it looks like beer to me. All that blackness…”
The smell had caught up with him though…
“Get me a nose pincher!”
Then a big head with bright eyes popped around the corner…
“Could I add a Cheerio, Mom?”
He might have also employed use of the pepper grinder. And a handful of soil from the murdered plant bed in the library. But after all that, we did have a purple egg. Then he pulled a drinking straw from the drawer…
“This is going to taste delicious, Mom.”
Fortunately he has a mom who won’t encourage ingestion of products containing soap. And it also made me feel a little better that later I realized he hadn’t meant “beer”, but “root beer”.
“This is going to be a wonderful drink for the ants! When I pour it out on the sidewalk… Wonderful!… Oh, Crackers! Crackers, you’re going to DIE. She drunk my experiment. A little bit of it…”
Later, Puck carefully watched me eat a wedge of cheddar to kill the mid-morning realization that I had only eaten one hard-boiled egg for breakfast. He dug into a ziplock of toothpicks beside him and pulled one out…
“Need a toothpick, Mom?” He grinned at me wickedly. “I only sneezed on them LAST WEEK!”
So subtle.
I cracked out the asparagus again at eleven. And other things like carrots, parsley, spinach, and more disgusting stuff that I make myself eat. It was time for “Spring Celebration Soup”. I certainly wasn’t celebrating anything, not when I was staring unflinchingly into the eyes of another stalk of asparagus. But it had to be done.
Puck was also pretty thrilled to add the vegetable scraps to his ongoing experiment, narrating his own cooking show as he plunked pieces of parsley into the brew…
“And you can also keep this on Spotify. For different occasions… Show time.”
The soup ended up looking completely boring actually. I didn’t try it. Mostly because the crisper had frozen all the vegetables and I wasn’t so interested in sampling the final results. The Bear is my guinea pig. I’m running at about 70% success on that.
You know your son’s starting to grow up when, after you have a good old-fashioned rough-house later that afternoon, you hear him say boldly to you…
“You stopped my blood flow, woman!”
…with a huge grin on his face as if he’s just made a good joke.
The day passed in a blink. I helped a young man scrub two very green-stained scabby hands in soap and warm water before tucking him in for the night after one last check-in on his “root beer”, to which he added a necklace of green St. Patrick’s Day beads.
“Stay up till I get back,” The Bear told me.
Paper sack of Culver’s cheese curds.
