Ketchup

Mets won six of seven this last week.  Leaped from last place to second.  Lotsa luck involved in the streak, but a win is a win.

La petite huque, the little clowncars and I planted tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapeno and Anaheim peppers, strawberries, carrots.  Some drought resistant grasses (stil haven't pulled the trigger on the buffalo grass).   Framed two small gardens for the girls to call their own.  They found worms while digging, and after screaming (less out of fear than the delight of screaming) put them in jars of dirt and declared them to be pets.  One is named "Wormo."  One is named "the Mets."

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A new flash fiction is below. Well, mostly fiction.

Ketchup

He is in a McDonald’s with the twins and their brother. Sadie wants a Happy Meal with Chicken McNuggets, Madison wants two cheeseburgers and fries, and he is unable to learn what Jaden wants as Jaden is happily engaged at the condiments counter, filling an endless series of small plastic cups with ketchup from the dispenser. He is sure Jaden has ketchup on his hands, his clothes, the counter, the floor. He is too tired to look, too fearful at the unholy red mess he is certain to find.

Long minutes later, when the food is finally delivered, the kids all trudge to the white plastic table with little hands full of napkins and ketchup cups and little paper salt packets and greasy bags of food. He tags along irritably behind them, as if herding sheep, keeping them in line, on task.

He does not often let them eat at McDonald’s but they have eaten there seven or eight times this last month, too busy to cook after the visits to the hospital, the homes of various relatives, the funeral parlor.

He would like to compose some snarky irony comparing the sterility of the McDonald’s to the antiseptic nature of hospitals but cannot, it does not ring true, the McDonald’s is not sterile in the least, there are splotches of ketchup on the floor, grains of salt scattered on the tables, crushed French fries at their feet.

It is messy.

Life is messy. An unholy red mess.

To be honest, the hospital wasn’t all that antiseptic either.

The house is a pigsty. Clothes, dishes, newspapers, mail. There is so much cleaning up to do. More than anything else he wants to mourn the way people on television mourn, staring into a serene sunset, walking on a beach as waves crash and gulls coo, but Jaden is putting French fries up his nose, desperate for approving laughter, Madison needs to go to the bathroom, right now, and poor Sadie looks on the verge of tears. He needs time, needs silence and solitude, but the situation immediately at hand does not allow it, things will not fall into place, this untidy business of life just goes on and on and on.