Kind of a shit month. Short-staffed at work because of a serious accident, the baby mynah died, and a
plane crash near the library killed at least 6 of our patrons. This morning I failed to rescue a fledgling before the cat got it, and only managed to get its body away to bury while its parents screamed. Feeling very bad about it.
But this week there was also a birthday, and a homemade cake with layers of
chocolate cream, rose & raspberry,
Italian buttercream, and an inferno of candles. I tried to go vertical with the candles using a cake candelabra, but the cheap candles with went up like tallow, caught the candelabra on fire, and shot flame a foot in the air. A birthday cake to challenge the recipient's 100% survival rate.
Leif is the designated firestarter in our household
Suspecting this candelabra was not made with real silver
Probably shouldn't have put the kitten in the bbq collage. Did not bbq kitten.
my lovely hams
A story
Every summer the parks department brings big groups of day-camp kids up to the library, and I like to sit them in a circle and tell them scary stories. Their favorites are the
true stories, and they've heard most of mine a dozen times by now, so while we were sitting around drinking birthday Guinness, my mother added this one to the rotation.
- - -
As a little girl on Guam, my mother spent a lot of time chasing around after her older brother and his friends, and they spent a lot of time trying to ditch her. Big kids have big kid things to do, like riding bikes and throwing rocks and jumping off of things, and little kids just get in the way. One afternoon, she followed the boys to an abandoned bomb shelter, where they had managed to break open the heavy door and sneak inside. She followed them in, and the kids stood in the light of the entrance, looking into the darkness. The bomb shelter was long, with a tiny square of light at the far end where the exit had been. Someone in years past had brought down a pillow, and there were chunks of foam stuffing on the dirt floor. The thing to do, of course, was to dare each other to race through the darkness to that small square of light at the far end. The boys took off running, and my mother ran along behind. In the darkness, she passed a shape on the ground and felt that there were black holes like eyes watching her as she ran by. At the end, the boys waited until she caught up, and then ran back the other way. She chased them, then slowed down in the middle and looked at the dark shape with the holes like eyes. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness and the shapes were indistinct grey in the black tunnel. As she stepped closer to look, something sharp and hard broke under her foot, exactly like a bone. The holes like eyes resolved themselves into the dark sockets of a skull. She ran, caught the boys at the entrance of the tunnel as they were preparing themselves to race back again. "Don't go back there! There's a
skeleton!" Nobody believes a little sister, but the promise of a skeleton is just too good, so the boys yelled, "All
right! A
skeleton!" and ran straight back into the darkness to check it out. There was a long quiet moment, and then they came screaming back, out of the shelter, onto their bikes, and left the little girl running after them all the way home. She came skidding into the kitchen just in time to hear her brother's friend break the most basic and unspoken rule of childhood; he
told the grownups. That idiot boy opened up his mouth and yelled, "There's a SKELETON IN THE BOMB SHELTER!" My mother was shocked by this betrayal.
Their father did exactly what a grownup could be expected to do. He told the kids off, banned them from playing in abandoned tunnels, and then marched straight over to the bomb shelter to see it for himself. The kids waited, feeling nervous and foolish.
But my mother had been right. The holes like eyes
had been watching, the thing that felt like bone
had been a bone, and there
was a skeleton in the bomb shelter.
"A dog," her dad said. "Probably."
Probably.
