This is based on something I did when I was a kid. I had fun, even if there are still a few brown spots that I missed in the kitchen.
"Where are you going? Don’t you want to watch the parade?"
"I’m just going to make myself a Coke. I’ll be right back."
Seven-year-old Allie padded on bare feet into the yellow kitchen, yellow being the most apt description of it: yellow paint, yellow refrigerator, yellow oven, yellow curtains, even a yellow Tupperware container lying in the sink (whose basin was white but whose exterior was, of course, yellow.) Standing on tiptoe, her small fingers wrapped tightly around the two-liter bottle so as not to drop it, she brought it down from the shelf.
Her mother had told her that if she ever did drop a Coke bottle, she shouldn’t open it because Coke spewed when you shook it up and opened it. A sudden fiendish curiosity gripped her then: I should try this before I get too old. Her fingers closed on the bottle’s plastic neck and she began to shake it.
"Are you doing all right in there?"
"I’m fine, Mommy." She had to stop shaking it just long enough to make a natural-sounding reply, but she started quickly again so as not to lose the effects of what she’d already done.
Finally, grinning in impish anticipation, she gripped the ridged cap and twisted hard. The fssssst of the angry, hissing, escaping air was one of the most exhilarating sounds she’d ever heard. If the sticky liquid that decorated her face had been sea-spray on a whaling vessel, she could hardly have been more excited. This was the word spew in action!
She threw a glance about her to see how all the yellow was taking this -- not well. Everything was brown-speckled. The curtains glistened with moisture. The paint had brown leopard spots. Trails of Coke coursed down the metal appliances. A tiny pool of fizzing brown liquid had collected in the Tupperware bowl.
And then -- "You’ve been quiet and out of my sight too long. What are you doing?" followed by her mother’s footfall.
Allie sat down, Indian-style, on the wet linoleum and prayed for the apocalypse, wishing she and the Coke bottle in her lap could just blend in, but they were both wearing red in a yellow world.
"Oh, God ... Allie ... why?" her mother managed after three eternal inarticulate seconds.
"Ummm ... Happy New Year?"
"Nice try. Go get a sponge."
Back to Stuff I Wrote.
© Cynthia 2002.