Spring 2010 Issue
by Stefanie Freele
Her shoulders ache nicely from scrubbing. More Ajax, more circles, more rub rub rub. A workout finally! She yells to her son in the other room, “Make noises so I can hear you.”
The naked toddler grunts while bending his Wasabi, the name given to the green man at the end of the wire that pedals his feet when pushed. Wasabi is mangled into a semi-circle and unable to cruise the living room.
“Are you reading?” Her son is grunting and must be reading the book about the pigs. She feels like a pig. Never gets to the gym. Skips walks to nap. Her mamma-gut jiggles.
The child rips shreds of paper towel and blows pieces into the air like Mom does with feathers from pillows.
“Do you see the whale picture? Blowing his spout?” She is a whale. Why didn’t she hire someone long ago to watch him so she could get more rest and exercise?
He stands on his tiny wicker rocking chair and waits for the inevitable, “Don’t stand on your chair!”
“You love rocking in your chair don’t you?” She smiles while getting the muck behind the toilet, the Q-tips, the toilet paper.
He eats the corner of Suess’s scary pale green pants book but doesn’t hear, “Books are for reading!”
He finds a pencil under the table and puts it in his mouth. The forbidden dog bed is a comfy place to rest and chew on a pencil. He hears mom say “Talk to me. I want to make sure you aren’t in trouble,” and replies “Ah! Ffft. Fffft. Dadda.” He puts a foot on the dog’s shoulder, a message to tell her that she can get in the dog bed with him; there is plenty of room.
The dog doesn’t trust the naked boy’s kicking feet and darts away.
“Are you playing with your puppy? She loves you.”
From now on, she decides, she will hand scrub all the tile floors. This way she will keep some muscles in her arms, muscles that are wasting away from being a full-time single mom who never gets to the gym. “What are you doing now?”
“Mmmmmmm.” The pencil gets soft and then hard as he puts his teeth in. It’s a nifty feeling to crunch on a pencil. “Mmmm.”
“Do you see a cow?” If only she could go for a long walk again. If only she could just leave him for an hour or two. “Was that your cow noise?” She sees women all the time who don’t have a toddling shadow. Women who can stand alone now and then.
The dog notes that the boy is resting and not prodding. She finds room in the dog bed and stretches next to the little warm body.
The toddler rests a bare foot on the dog’s back, who flinches but since the foot is fairly weightless, doesn’t get up and move.
He hears the word cow. “Mmmmmmm.” The pencil isn’t all that tasty, in fact it is grainy and worse than the next-day-rice mom sometimes tries to sneak on the high chair, but so far hasn’t been able to convince him to eat.
He hands over the pencil to the dog and grabs his new blue shoe instead. It makes for a good pillow and he rests his ear inside the shoe listening to the muffled whhhshh whhhhsh whhhhsh sounds from wherever Mom is.
She rinses the brush, reclips her hair and follows the trail of removed diaper, torn paper towels, tipped rocking chair, strewn books, and bitten pencil to the dog bed.
In it, her sleeping son, curled like a feral child in a wolf den.
Stefanie Freele is the author of the short story collection Feeding Strays (Lost Horse Press). Her fiction can also be found in lovely literary magazines such as Glimmer Train, American Literary Review, Pedestal Review, Vestal Review, Smokelong Quarterly and Night Train. Stefanie is the Fiction Editor of the Los Angeles Review and has an MFA from the Whidbey Writers Workshop – Northwest Institute of
Literary Arts. www.stefaniefreele.com
