The exercise:
Write about: a vision of the future.
After a fairly quiet and relaxing day off, Kat and I brought Max with us to a potluck dinner with some friends just south of Oliver this evening. Much good food was eaten, much good times were had.
Back to the garden tomorrow.
Mine:
There were several other families at the dinner tonight, each with at least one child with them. I think the total was eight kids (not including Max), and I'm pretty sure it worked out evenly - four boys, four girls.
The youngest was around two years old, the eldest maybe eight. When they weren't eating (which was only briefly) or jumping on the trampoline (which was often), they were pretty much running around constantly.
There were tears, there was laughter, there was a whole lot of getting into things they weren't supposed to be getting into.
During all this Max was sitting in mine or Katherine's lap, other than a brief visit with one of the other mothers at the table. He ate his dinner, he smiled a lot, he babbled for a while. It was nice.
But it was hard, with evidence aplenty, to avoid thinking about where all this is headed one day...
4 comments:
Damnit, I wanted the prompt to be potluck!
Well, the good food sounds nice, though I'm less thrilled at the idea of eight children under eight (that sounds like a charity website...); that just sounds like the food's going to get cold while people keep trying to resolve the children's issues. I've done it with three children, and it's definitely more of a task than a treat. But still, kids need to learn about eating out somehow :)
Vision of the future though... how many kids are you planning on having, and have you told Kat yet?!
Vision of the future
Madame Sosotris, sneezy seer and jaded jezebel, tapped her crystal ball with a fingernail so long and black it deserved to be called a talon.
"It's on the blink," she said. The repairman, who had been under the impression that he was here to get his fortune told, looked puzzled.
"Can you fix it?" she asked, the droplet on the end of her nose trembling. He watched it with fascination, wondering when it would fall, then realised she was waiting for an answer.
"Um," he said. "Uh, have you tried hitting with anything?" He lifted the tablecloth to see if there were any wires going into it that might have come loose, but Madame Sosotris, aged 70 if she was a day, slapped his hand.
"Naughty!" she said. "I'm not wearing any drawers! Hit it with what?"
"I've got a hammer you can borrow," said the repairman.
"Hmm, no. I think I have something in here...." Madame Sosotris opened a drawer in a chest to her left without standing up, much to the repairman's relief. She extracted what looked like a human thigh bone and rapped the crystal ball with it. It rang, a high, lonesome sound. Then it filled with a kaleidoscopic chaos of images.
"Ah, perfect!" said Madame Sosotris. "You may have a free reading for that. Would you like to know how you die? When you die? How... how many people are going to be stabbing you when you die?" She leaned into the crystal ball, peering intently into its depths.
The repairman was staring at the bone though, which had a small tag on it, which read, "Femur: Jane Austen."
"Uh, what?" he said.
Eye rolls, sudden fits of irritation,
Shrieks of 'You don't understand!'
I can see the future
And I don't like it.
(She's only six.)
She was on the bathroom floor sobbing hysterically. It wasn't sad as much as it was utterly pathetic. For the first time in my life, my insanely beautiful mother was absolutely disgusting. My mother, Queen Maeve, the intoxicating woman, is sprawled out on the newly retiled bathroom floor vomiting on herself. She has clearly taken on the pagan translation of queen Maeve, the intoxicated woman. Do I detect fruit loops on her Channel slippers? Oh my God. I closed the door and went back to my AP Trigonometry studying with the Harvard application burning through my skirt pocket. I might not pass trig. I might get laughed at by the 2 Ivy League schools I'm applying for. But I sure as hell am not staying here and becoming her.
Greg - the vision was of Max getting older, smartass, not having twenty kids of our own :P
Ah, your poor repairman. That doesn't sound like a visit he'll likely be forgetting any time soon.
Morganna - haha, yes, exactly. But that's just a stage, and stages pass.
... right? :P
Mo - powerful stuff. Can feel the emotion jumping off the page in this one.
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