Bachelor par Excellence.

I opened my eyes and waited for the room to come into focus. I lay on my back in my sleeping bag, on the carpet, the clear blue sky shining down on me through the mini-blinds. "What time is it?" The clock was of no use to me for it stood on the window-sill, silhouetted in sharp relief against the glaring daylight beyond. I loved waking up to the sky like that. From the floor, the trees and pasture are cropped out and all that can be seen is sky and clouds. And I could be anywhere, my apartment could be floating in the clouds itself or resting on a beach in the South Pacific somewhere. In those waking moments, the blissful disorientation made my heart flutter. I felt like I'd awakened in the foreground of a Salvador Dali painting. I yawned and stretched in my sleeping bag. I could feel the familiar chill of steel in the back of my thigh where the slide of my pistol was pressed against my skin. I unzipped the sleeping bag and withdrew the 0.40 caliber H&K USP. The gun felt solid and heavy in my hand with the tang nestled snugly in the crotch between my thumb and fore-finger. The athletic tape around the grip had been white at one time but had turned brown with the sweat and grime of constant handling.

I set the gun aside on the carpet and sat up, resting on my elbows. My eyes had adjusted. The hands of the clock indicated that it was half past eleven. But this meant that it was actually half past ten because I never changed my clocks for daylight savings. I stood and fetched my housecoat. It was a long, thick, black robe. I called it my "czar robe." It made me feel very aristocratic. It was Saturday and I had no appointments or obligations and the prospect of leisure made me euphoric. I turned and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. "Yes, indeed, very aristocratic." I mused, trying not to look at my unruly matted hair. I flared my neck muscles and set my jaw, making my czar face. My appearance was rather startling for I had the stubbly beginnings of a beard. A red beard. I turned my head to the side and tried to observe my profile out of the corner of my eye. This made me dizzy and I stumbled out into the living room.

I walked to the sliding glass doors and thrust the verticle blinds aside, allowing the sunlight to flood the room. Zoe stood next to me, wagging her tail and nudging me with her nose. " 'Morning, baby!" I yawned as I stooped to pat her head. Turning to face the room, I noticed the Samurai sword in my display case. It was actually a kai gunto (WWII Japanese naval officer's sword.) My grandfather had brought it home with him after WWII. I walked to the display case and drew the sword from its shark skin scabbard. The brass on the hilt was tarnished but the blade was in perfect condition. The steel gleemed in the morning sunlight, blinding me. I settled into a horse-back stance and lifted the sword above my head menacingly before plunging into the grizzly business of slaughtering invisble ninjas. I only knew a handful of Japanese words but these I half-shouted in an angry tone as I chopped at the air. When I was sufficiently exhausted from the carnage, I stopped and let the back of the blade rest on my shoulder. I was a bit out of breath. Zoe had wisely run for cover the instant that the sword had been drawn.

Next to me was the shelf where I kept my humidor. I lifted the lid with my free hand, reached inside, and retrieved a nice fat Nicaraguan cigar. The air in the room seemed stuffy so I stuck the cigar in my mouth and headed for the sliding glass doors. Zoe trotted after me and waited eagerly as I slid the glass door open. She shoved past me and pranced out onto the balcony ahead of me. The air was cool and sweet and the sun was warm on my face. The wooden planks were rough underfoot. The grass in the pasture had already gone gold with the first frost and tufts of dead gorse were scattered about. The wind chimes sang as they always did. I stood admiringly with the sword resting on my shoulder like a musket, the cigar protruding from my mouth, and my left hand buried in the front pocket of my robe. A mocking bird flitted past and I would like to have taken a swing at him with the sword for I was certain that he was the brazen cock sucker that had been defecating on my shiny red Evo.

It was then that I felt the weight of their eyes. I turned stiffly and noticed a crowd of staring people standing on an adjacent balcony. They were clearly dumb-struck. I had to feign arrogance to mask my embarrassment so I raised my chin at them in a stately manner and turned my gaze back to the pasture before me. And then the awkward pause where I counted off the seconds anxiously. I couldn't simply walk back inside after that little showdown, I had to wait. I had to let them know that I was a czar and, consequently, ashamed of nothing. I finally turned very slowly and stepped back inside the apartment. Ah, the amusements and day-to-day experiences afforded by the bohemian lifestyle.

Sunday School

The little house that sat off of I-65 and Alford Avenue was situated on a quiet little dead-end street that was skirted with quaint '70's-era homes and thick-trunked hardwood trees like oaks and maples. The asphalt had turned gray long ago and the edges of the street had begun to crumble as little sprigs of grass wormed their way up from beneath. The dead end of the street was halted by a densely wooded slope. It was there that a little trail wound its way from the road down through the trees to the parking lot of a modestly sized church. Conveniently enough, this was the church that we attended. On most Sundays when the weather was fair, we would stroll down the road in our Sunday clothes and follow the trail through the woods. Correction: Mom and Dad would follow the trail and Em', Joel, and I would dangle from their clenched fists like limp little tiger cubs as they staggered over the treacherous braids of tree-roots. It's just low-bred to do anything on a trail besides hike or camp and emerging from the woods into a public place like that just wreaked of hillbilly-ness. A family of five spilling out of a hobble-trail into the parking lot was a real show-stopper. Fortunately I was too young to be embarrassed by much of anything other than falling down or getting yelled at by big people.

It's rather silly, the institution of Sunday School is. It's not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. That's because the Brits invented it. They invented it so that they could collect and torture orphans for a couple of hours every Sunday. Then the big people decided that it wasn't fair to torture only orphans on Sunday so all kids were dragged kicking and screaming into little rooms full of paste and construction paper where they were taught to glue macaroni pasta to stuff. This is really confusing because they tell you about all the poor starving children that don't live in America. If these kids are starving to death, then why the hell are we gluing perfectly edible macaroni pasta to xeroxed black-and-white portraits of the baby Jesus? You'll only ever ask the big people that question once because they'll make you sit in the corner until your parents come to get you.

With a biblical name like Joshua, it's hard not to be importuned with all that Jericho business. How you "fit" some damn battle or something. I had my own song and the teacher would always wink at me collusively when we sang it. "And the walls came a tumbling down..." Ho f-ing hum. Everytime you turned around, some condescending big person was telling you what your name meant. Then they would tuck their jaws into their triple chins, raise one of their eyebrows, and stare at you as if you were suddenly going to worship them for enlightening you.

And the clothes. Of all the psychologically degrading rubbish you could be exposed to. The Summer clothes were egregious. After church, the playground always looked like a Summer camp for aspiring rodeo clowns. I think that on some Freudian level, Church clothes are why nudist colonies exist. I admit, some kids are exhibitionists from birth, but when you're hiding in a miniature fortress made of railroad ties, and you're tearing a hideous pair of seersucker britches off, the last thing you're thinking about is showing people what you've got. Aside from being dreadfully uncomfortable, they restricted your mobility. Not so much physically. Sure, they were tight in all the wrong places, but if you so much as thought about mud or dirt or grease or tar or persimmon juice or blood, you were sure to get covered from head to toe in the sh!t. I mean that stuff would be on you like Michael Jackson on a bus load of drunken cub scouts. So you ended up walking stiffly past mud puddles like you were sneaking past a den of rabid werweasels. You never left the sidewalks and you got funny looks for wearing your raincoat all the time.

After the baby Jesus was sufficiently burried beneath a veritable mountain of macaroni pasta, cotton balls, sequins, paste, and glitter; and after you had glued your hands together, the big people would make you sing silly songs about your "little light" or never marching in the "infant tree." The "little light" song was really perplexing. You hold your index finger up and sing: "This little light of mine. I'm gonna let it shine." Is it a flashlight or a candle or what? They don't tell you. And then it gets to the part: "Hide it under a bush? Hell no!" Ok, I'm with them there. I mean, if my "little light" is a candle, then I certainly don't want to put it under a bush. But, "hell" was a word that got you a mouthful of dish detergent and here we were singing/shouting it in Sunday School! It was very confusing. Once I tried to sing it as: "Hide it under a bush? Dammit no!" And I got the taste slapped out of my mouth.

Crafts and activities. "Crafts" and "activities" were the rudiments of the Sunday School ritual. Everything was centered around "crafts" and "activities." Crafts were pretty straight forward: you glue macaroni pasta to stuff. But activities were a product of big people's desperation to maintain some semblance of order when things went awry. Invariably all activities began with enticing the snotty-nosed lot of us to sit in a circle, be it around a table or on the floor. It didn't matter, the point was you and your inmates were all sitting in a circle facing each other. The big people accomplished this feat with the promise of food or the application of reverse psychology. Really, you can't deny the brilliance of it. "Hey, kids, by all means keep throwing blocks and lawn darts at each others' heads. But whatever you do, don't sit in a circle...HEY! I SAID DON'T SIT IN A CIRCLE!!!" So you are all assembled in a circle, or some geometrical abortion that passes for a circle. It's then that the big people toss a random pile of household items in front of you and proceed to give you "instructions" to follow. That was a mistake. The big person would say: "Follow the instructions, Josh." And I just shrugged and thought to myself: "Follow 'em where? Around the room? You tools already told me I couldn't go out in the hall." Invariably, the big people would get flustered and shove you aside. "No! Like this!"

You could tell that they were making it up as they went. The activity that I always love to bring up is so retarded that you can't even give it a name that has fewer than twenty words in it. As always, they would compel us to sit around a table. Then a bowl was placed in the centre of the table. At the age of four, my qualitative analysis skills were as yet terribly undeveloped. Theretofore, such skills had only been employed to deduce the constituent ingredients in strange and unappealing casseroles and quiches. Now, with the advantages of college chemistry and life experience in general, I can maintain with confidence that the bowl held a solution that was a mixture of paint, dish detergent, water, and high-fructose corn syrup. I'm most confident about the latter ingredient because that sh!t's in everything. Anyways, before we had time to decide our own fates, they would shove plastic drinking straws into our glue-covered hands and command us to "blow bubbles." We were kids but we weren't stupid. Everyone knows that big people snort and fuss and swat at you when you blow bubbles in your milk or your juice. We all looked across the table at each other with confused expressions as if to say: "You think this is a trick or a test?" We were kids but we weren't stupid. We just looked at one another and with our eyes, we were asking: "What does this have to do with gluing macaroni to baby Jesus?" And so a few seconds of silence would pass, marked only by the occasionaly sniffle of a snotty nose. "Like this!" A big person would snap impatiently, as they leaned over and blew bubbles in the mysterious concoction. We would look at each other skeptically and one by one we would lean forward and blow through our straws. It was pretty exciting...at first.

Indeed, the bubbles began to fill the bowl as we puffed. And as children are wont to do, we grew very preoccupied with the activity. Though I've never seen it accomplished, I think this activity was originally intended to be a craft. That is, when the bowl began to overflow with bubbles, a piece of white paper was placed over the top and as the bubbles beneath the paper burst, they would leave behind beautiful patterns. Again, I'm only surmising here because we never got that far. The idea that this activity had no pratical purpose; has, for me, been the cause of extreme mental anguish. Thus in the years following the incident, I spent many a sleepless night tossing and turning as I struggled to comprehend the purpose of such a cruel and seemingly pointless activity.

As I was relating, this bowl full of mystery goo was set in the centre of a round table and we were directed to blow bubbles in the goo using the drinking straws that the big people had handed out. The table was rather broad, so we were forced to stand in our chairs in order to reach the bowl; some of us even had to army-crawl to the centre of the table. We blew through the straws as hard and as fast as we could. The big people looked on and urgently prodded us to "blow faster." I blew as hard as I could and I could feel my face turning bright red. My cheeks were throbbing and I was beginning to hyperventilate. I emptied my lungs through the narrow straw and I suddenly started to feel very sleepy and I saw little pink and purple dots of light flickering all around me. This was very distracting and when I went to inhale, I forgot to take the straw out of my mouth. I sucked up a mouthful and half a lungfull of the bubbly blue concoction. My eyeballs thrust the lids aside and climbed out of their sockets. My stomach went tight. BLECH!!! Blue stuff burst from my nose and mouth and a cloud of blue mist obscured my vision. When the cloud settled, the kids across from me looked like little smurfs. I blinked in horror. Their little blue faces blinked back at me, mouths gaping. Before I could react, my stomach tightened once more and my cheeks ballooned. BLECH!!!! I opened my eyes to find that I had contributed a stomach full of soggy Cheerios to the bowl of blue sludge. BLECHHHHHHHH!!! I had initiated a chain reaction. We emptied ourselves like confetti cannons.

In under a minute, the tabletop was hidden beneath a writhing mass of vomiting three year olds. BLECHHHHHHH!!! Torrents of Fruitloops, oatmeal, Lucky Charms, scrambled eggs, sausage, marmalade, and grits spilled out onto the table. The smell was revolting. Some of the big people gagged and coughed, the rest just gasped and ran to get paper towels. Those of us who had finished retching, began to scream in terror. It was pure pandemonium. I'm still in therapy.

I'd be remiss, if I did not mention the practical lessons that we learned in Sunday School. For instance, one Sunday, I unwittingly demonstrated for the class the wrong way to stand on a folding chair. Consequently, I also demonstrated the wrong way to patiently and calmly wait for assistance after being eaten by a folding chair. After wrestling with folding chairs, I learned that despite the amazing similarities, brown crayons do not taste like Tootsie Rolls. And for those of you who may not know this, you can make orange Play-Doh by mixing yellow Play-Doh with blood.

The "Known World"

The very first house that I can remember living in was located in Bluff Park just off of I-65 and Alford Avenue. What stands out most prominently in my memory is the yard. I guess now is as good a time as any to describe The Yard. The backyard, to be precise. The front yard was about as foreign to me as the rest of the territory that filled the world beyond the chainlink fence that encompassed the "known world," that is, the backyard. When we were not in the bathtub, we could usually be found rolling around in the luxurious carpets of thick green Saint Augustine grass beneath the sprawling pines, rooting around in the monkey grass that bordered EVERYTHING, or peddling our Big wheels around on the huge brick patio.

That patio stood out like a cameo. It was thirty-feet in diameter and it floated like an island in the centre of the yard and was connected to the back steps of the house by an isthmus of solidly mortared bricks that formed a wide walkway. At the foot of the back steps, this walkway was joined by another that led to the gate in the northwest corner of the yard. The bricks in the patio were lain unevenly causing the patio to ripple the way that the surface of a catfish pond ripples on a breezy day. Here and there, the crevices between the bricks were stuffed with moss, or splayed around the mouths of chipmunk burrows. In the mornings, a haphazard assembly of oaks, hickories, and dogwoods draped their shadows over the patio like a giant sheet of black lace. These trees, that lived on the eastern side of the patio, blanketed the bricks with their leaves in the Fall. And the dogwoods dropped their clusters of berries that reminded me, for some odd reason, of stars and I would often point these berry clusters out, insisting that they had fallen from the sky during the night.

One of these dogwoods originated from a tangled mass of roots that was wedged between the patio and one of the rusted iron poles that supported an old moss-covered awning. This awning was crammed uncomfortably between the trunks of the bigger trees and a pair of brick steps led from the patio down to the bare earth beneath the awning. It was there that Dad kept his lawn-mower. And to the north of the awning stood a veritable Goliath of an oak tree. From this tree our magnificent rope swing hung. It was a simple swing, made from a single length of manilla rope that Dad had fastened to one of the tree's upper boughs. The manilla rope was as thick as my leg, so thick that I couldn't close my hands around it and had to hug it instead. It went up up up into the shady confines of the leafy canopy, so high that if you tried to see where it was tied off, you would fall over backwards. There was a round wooden seat that Dad had made and the rope went through a hole in the middle before forming a knot that was as big as my head. Below the the knot, the unraveled strands of rope hung and swept the dusty ground like a broom. The ground was dusty there because it was bare where our feet had vied for traction. Mom had done her part too. She had painted the seat a dark green color and over the green, she had painted a glossy pair of cherries. Why cherries? I don't know. It made no difference because when Dad pushed you on that swing, cherries were the last thing on your mind. He would push you so high that you could see the leaves rotting on top of the awning and you could see all of the world that stretched beyond the fence.

The other end of the awning bordered what could be described as a monument to Mom's shortcomings as a gardener. It was a scraggly tangle of grass that every now and then sported a lethargic tomato plant or an emaciated stalk of corn. Mom always yelled at us when we ventured there, always worried that we'd kill the poor plant before she did.

In back of the awning, on the side farthest from the patio, there was a cinderblock retaining wall that spanned the width of the yard, and running parallel to the back fence. The remianing strip of yard between this wall and the back fence was hidden beneath waist-high grass. We never ventured there because everyone knew that big big snakes lived there. But we wasted plenty of time standing atop the retainig wall and heaving big rocks into the grass in hopes of provoking the big snakes to come out into the open where we could see them. We nearly gave up this obsession after Mom caught us shoving Dad's lawn-mower over the retaining wall.

The part of the yard west of the patio, the part that flanked the walkway on either side, was covered with rich green Saint Augustine. And here and there, the tallest pines you've ever seen stretched to the sky with arching boughs that cradled the clouds. I was convinced that these were the trees that had inspired Rock-A-Bye Baby. Just north of the walkway was the infamous barbecue pit where the carpenter ant munched on my right nut. Let's not forget the little flower beds all bordered by monkey grass. These sat off of the north side of the patio as well. Though Mom planted the bulbs upside down, the tulips never ceased to grow.

That was The Yard. In the Summer, we danced there barefoot and picnicked and napped under the pines on a big quilt that Mom spread on the grass. And in the Winter, we waddled around back there with drippy red noses or stood in a circle facing each other with arms akimbo, trying to act like big people. Regardless of the season, we enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Batting Practice.

Interestingly ( or perhaps dusturbingly ) enough, most of my childhood memories are of bathtub activities. We took a lot of baths, my sister, brother, cousins, and I. In fact, I was in third grade before I learned that my fingers were not supposed to be all pruney like that. As I mentioned in a previous anecdote, my Mom more-or-less raised my cousins during the time that my aunt was divorced. Thus, for all practical purposes, my mother had five children ranging from birth to five years of age. Four of us; my cousins, Paul and Phil;my sister, Emily; and I, were between the ages of two and five. My mom always tossed the four of us into the tub at once. This made for some very fascinating discussions about what had "happened" to Em's "weenery." It was obvious to us [Paul, Phil, and me] that Em' had no weenery and we were quick to point this out whenever the subject arose. Em' was very exhasperated by this, and she declared that her "winnowee" was on her bum.

My cousins and I, being children, were not keen on backing down when it was obvious that we were right. But when Em's face turned red, we knew that we had better start pretending. You have to understand some things about Em'. She was born with fiery red hair and a wicked cow-lick that left her with a permanent mohawk. The surliness of her hairdo corresponded remarkably with her disposition and her marked propensity for violence. She was younger than we were and yet she could give us all a beating that made Dad's belt feel like an all-girl pillow fight in an anorexia ward. To her, every toy and house-hold item was a melee weapon. She was peerless in her ability to deliver blunt force trauma with a Rainbow Brite doll or Teddy Ruxpin. And that battery-pack in Teddy Ruxpin is a bitch! She could do things to you with a Skipper Doll that would make Schutzstaffel interrogators blush with envy. But what made Em' really scary, was that she was wild and uninhibited, the kind of kid that you don't turn your back on. Kind of like a billygoat. If you turned your back on her, even for an instant, you could get coldcocked for no reason at all. It was some scary sh!t. You'd be humming along to Dixie whilst watching The Dukes of Hazard and sipping apple juice and then WHAM, you'd get donkey-punched in the throat. You would hear her shrieking diabolical laughter. She sounded like an emphysemic Tasmanian devil in a yodeling match. Sometimes it was scarier to see her coming especially when she was stalking you; she would dash behind a piece of furniture and all you could see was her little red mohawk bobbing up and down with each step. It was like a fuzzy little dorsal fin. If you can imagine a sadistic Treasure Troll in a cloth diaper and plastic pants, you've got the picture. We were all terrified.

There was nowhere to hide. One morning, I was riding my Big wheel around on the enourmous brick patio in our backyard when Em' decided that it would be expedient to use my head for batting practice. It was Saturday morning and Paul and Phil were at home with my aunt so I was alone in the backyard with Satan. I had seen Em' pick up the baseball bat about five minutes earlier and had kept one eye pop-riveted to the back of her skull as she assaulted a bed of tulips and daffodils. My heart bolted and the back of my neck felt like a pin-cushion as she turned. I jerked my eyes away, retracting my gaze like a tape measure, and I pretended to make motorcycle noises as I peddled around the patio. "Don't look her in the eyes, it only makes her aggressive." Famous last words. My Big wheel jolted as the front tire grew wedged between a couple of bricks. I gulped. Sudden movements were bad. She always homed in on stuff like that. You know, the usual stuff like the smell of fear, fresh blood, shiny objects, small children, wounded animals, et cetera. ( Seriously, the first time I saw the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, I was like: "You f-ing amateurs!" ) I strained at the peddles in an effort to get the Big wheel moving again but I froze as I heard the crunch of monkeygrass. I had to look. I swung my head around to face the noise. All I saw were two crumpled tufts of monkey grass that were slowly standing back up. There! I saw a dark blur of OshKosh denim in my peripheral vision and I could hear the skuffling of her Buster Browns on the bricks. She was breathing heavily through her nose, a sure sign that she was focused too intently on being sneaky. I ducked instinctively, shoving my head between my knees. Crack! The bat caromed off of the top of the Big wheel's seat and the report was followed by a shriek of maniacal laughter. Strike One. I had to act quickly while she was winding up for the next swing. My blood was saturated with adrenaline and I had cotton mouth like a champ! I shot up out of my seat, spun to face her, planted the palm of my hand squarely in her face and shoved. It was like a reviewing footage of a tragic gymnastics accident. Everyone tilts their heads and grimaces and goes: "Ohhhh ouch!" as the guy's neck folds in half. It was that bad. Fortunately for her, her mohawk broke her fall and; unfortunately for me, she was back on her feet and charging before my squeal had escaped my throat.

It was a panicked sprint that carried me the thirty-or-so yards to the back door of the house. She was right on my heels and her laughter had taken a crazed throaty tone, indicating that she was done playing and had grown feverish with bloodlust. My shoes tore at the grass and my Toughskins whistled hoarsely between my thighs as I ran. I was pulling away, but I still had to negotiate the impending bottleneck at the backdoor. The tarnished brass knob presented a formidable challenge. I was only four and I had the dexterity of a quadriplegic ox. Besides, theretofore, none of us had ever succeeded in turning that knob. It was an obstinate old relic that only "big people" [adults] could manipulate. If we ever needed to get into the house, we had to assemble ourselves at the door like little siege engines and pound away with our little fists and yell until Mom opened it from the inside. But I didn't have the luxury of time that day so Mom was of no use to me. On the bright side, though, I wouldn't have a screen door in the way to slow me down. All we had was a classic exterior door with a window in the upper half.

I had to climb six whole stairs to reach the porch and at four years old, a stair comes all the way up to your groin. I busied myself with the ascent. Em' had to lug the bat up the stairs with her so that bought me a couple of very precious seconds. I had the tickling sensation in the back of my neck because I expected her to take a swing at me at any second. Finally! I heaved myself onto the porch and dashed to the door. I took a running leap and bear-hugged the enourmous doorknob. My feet dangled beneath me as I grappled with the stubborn mechanism. I glanced back over my shoulder just in time to see Em's face as she crested the stairs. She was breathing heavily and her face was suffused with a red glow. The bat was at the ready, raised in the air above her head. Her tongue never seemed to fit in her mouth and, as always, it was thrust out to the side. Her tiny irises and dilated pupils were mere specks floating on the whites of her eyes and her smile was empty and manic. I could see the gates of hell reflected in her visage. Then would have been an appropriate time to scream something like: "The power of Christ compels you!" But I was too busy begging the obstinate brass knob for my life.

To my utter astonishment and immeasurable relief, the knob gave a mechanical belch and began to turn. I hung on for dear life as the door swung slowly inward. I was in no mood to enjoy the ride. ( Later on, I would introduce the concept of door-swinging to Paul and Phil and we would spend an entire afternoon swinging on my bedroom door until the hinges tore out of the jamb and the door fell on Phil.) I dropped onto the kitchen floor and landed awkwardly before staggering around to the back of the door and slamming it shut. I listened for the clink of the engaging latch and when I heard it, I collapsed with my back to the door. My heart was playing my sternum like a kettledrum and mouth was so dry that I was choking on my own tongue. Silence...

This is the part of the movie where the good guy thinks the bad guy is dead and he turns around to kiss hot babes or play a power love-ballad on his air guitar while the credits roll. I was young but I wasn't stupid. I knew that the beelzebatter was still out there. I tilted my head back slowly. Maybe she had been distracted by the mailman or some other small defenseless creature. CRAAAAASHHHHHH!!!!!!!! I screamed like a little girl. The bat blasted through the glass in the window above. I was baptised in a fountain of falling glass. I was young but I wasn't stupid. The sound of breaking glass! I went cold with dread. That sound was the precursor of the ass-ravaging hell that only Mom could dispense. That sound made big people foam at the mouth and chase you through the house. That sound meant that your bum was doomed.

I had glass in my hair and down my shirt. But that wasn't why I was crying. I was crying because Mom was foaming at the mouth as she stood, towering above me with a beefy wooden spatula in her hand. She was livid. I squealed and hid my face. With one fluid and powerful motion, Mom lifted me from the floor by the arm and set me aside on my feet. The glass grated and crunched under the soles of her shoes as she stepped to the door and flung it open. Mom stood in the doorway and Em' stood on the porch beyond, framed in the silhouettes of Mom's thighs. A twinge of glee checked my tears as I saw the fear spread across Em's face. She turned to run but Mom snatched her up so quickly that she seemed to have vanished. All that remained was the baseball bat which rolled to the edge of the porch and went clickedy clacking down the steps. POW POW POW POW POW!!! The sound of wooden spatula connecting with diaper-clad bum. And then Em's howling. My bum was already burning in anticipation. I turned to run. But Mom's hands were like vices. She spun me around to face her.

Strangely, she wasn't foaming at the mouth and her eyes were wide with concern and compassion. "Are you alright?" she asked. I nodded and sniffled as she dusted the shards of glass out of my hair and pulled my shirt off. Em' was still wailing behind her. "You two need a bath." Mom sighed.