the boss of play but Ma’s the boss of meals, like she doesn’t let us have cereal for
breakfast and lunch and dinner in case we’d get sick and anyway that would use it up too fast. When I was zero and one, Ma used to chop and chew up my food for me, but then I got all my
twenty teeth and I can gnash up anything. This lunch is tuna on crackers, my job is to roll back the lid of the can because Ma’s wrist can’t manage it.
I’m a bit jiggly so Ma says let’s play Orchestra, where we run around seeing what noises we can bang out of things. I drum on Table and Ma goes knock knock on the legs of Bed,
then floomf floomf on the pillows, I use a fork and spoon on Door ding ding and our toes go bam on Stove, but my favorite is stomping on the pedal of Trash because that pops
his lid open with a bing. My best instrument is Twang that’s a cereal box I collaged with all different colored legs and shoes and coats and heads from the old catalog, then I
stretched three rubber bands across his middle. Old Nick doesn’t bring catalogs anymore for us to pick our own clothes, Ma says he’s getting meaner.
I climb on Rocker to get the books from Shelf and I make a ten-story skyscraper on Rug. “Ten stories,” says Ma and laughs, that wasn’t very funny.
We used to have nine books but only four with pictures inside—
My Big Book of Nursery Rhymes
Dylan the Digger
The Runaway Bunny
Pop-Up Airport
Also five with pictures only on the front—
The Shack
Twilight
The Guardian
Bittersweet Love The Da Vinci Code
Ma hardly ever reads the no-pictures ones except if she’s desperate. When I was four we asked for one more with pictures for Sundaytreat and Alice in Wonderland came, I like her but
she’s got too many words and lots of them are old.
Today I choose Dylan the Digger, he’s near the bottom so he does a demolition on the skyscraper crashhhhhh.
“Dylan again.” Ma makes a face, then she puts on her biggest voice:
“ ‘Heeeeeeeeere’s Dylan, the sturdy digger!
The loads he shovels get bigger and bigger.
Watch his long arm delve into the earth,
No excavator so loves to munch dirt.
This mega-hoe rolls and pivots round the site,
Scooping and grading by day and night.’ ”
There’s a cat in the second picture, in the third it’s on the pile of rocks. Rocks are stones, that means heavy like ceramic that Bath and Sink and Toilet are of, but not so smooth.
Cats and rocks are only TV. In the fifth picture the cat falls down, but cats have nine lives, not like me and Ma with just one each.
Ma nearly always chooses The Runaway Bunny because of how the mother bunny catches the baby bunny in the end and says, “Have a carrot.” Bunnies are TV but carrots are real, I
like their loudness. My favorite picture is the baby bunny turned into a rock on the mountain and the mother bunny has to climb up up up to find him. Mountains are too big to be real, I saw one in
TV that has a woman hanging on it by ropes. Women aren’t real like Ma is, and girls and boys not either. Men aren’t real except Old Nick, and I’m not actually sure if he’s
real for real. Maybe half? He brings groceries and Sundaytreat and disappears the trash, but he’s not human like us. He only happens in the night, like bats. Maybe Door makes him up with a beep beep and the air changes. I think Ma doesn’t like to talk about him in case he gets realer.
I wriggle around on her lap now to look at my favorite painting of Baby Jesus playing with John the Baptist that’s his friend and big cousin at the same time. Mary’s there too,
she’s cuddled in her Ma’s lap that’s Baby Jesus’s Grandma, like Dora’s abuela . It’s a weird picture with no colors and some of the hands and feet
aren’t there, Ma says it’s not finished. What started Baby Jesus growing in Mary’s tummy was an angel zoomed down, like a ghost but a really cool one with feathers. Mary was all
surprised, she said, “How can this be?” and then, “OK