A Short Story

You know that feeling that you get when you’re eating cereal and you haven’t been eating it quickly enough so the cereal starts to get soggy and then your parents die and you stop eating because you are sad that your parents just died?

Unfortunately, I know that feeling really well because it happened to me just this morning:

There I was, enjoying an oversized mixing bowl of Cap’n Crunch when my little sister Karen comes running into the room shouting about how she had just killed our parents and that I was going to be next. We shared a good laugh about the unlikely prospect of such a tragic situation as patricide occurring within our own family, but our glee would come to a crashing halt as Carl — our sibling who is two years older than Karen and six years younger than I am – stumbles into the room, his shirt stained red with blood.

“Mom and Dad just got killed by a wild dog!” Carl exclaims, his voice trembling, presumably with shock and sadness over the sudden loss of our parents.

“No way, that doesn’t actually happen to people,” Karen coolly reasons, sounding wise well beyond her 27 years.

“What, you think I would joke about our parents getting killed!?” Carl responds, prompting Karen and I to trade smiles as we simultaneously recall having shared a joke about the prospect of our parents’ untimely death just minutes earlier.

“Well shit,” I offer as I rise to my feet.

I can feel Carl, Karen and our cousin Larry, who to this point hadn’t said anything over the course of the past couple of minutes during which this story takes place, looking to me for guidance.

“We’re going to have a funeral for our dead parents,” I begin, choosing my words carefully because diction has always been very important to me. “It’s not going to be fun, but that’s what you do when people die.”

I have Larry call the funeral home to make the arrangements because Carl doesn’t like talking to strangers, Karen gets really edgy and combative when she mixes OxyContin and Boone’s Farm and I don’t speak Spanish well enough  (we live in Ecuador).

I like to think I really helped out my siblings during this rough patch in our family history and we’re all closer for having gone through it together, however, I also like to have women call me by my father’s name during intercourse, so I wouldn’t put too much stock into any judgment calls I make.