SPOON

by

Ellen Parker

For months after, she slept. Not continuously, of course, but in fits and starts and sometimes long stretches whenever it was appropriate and often when it was not. All of this prodigious slumber began once the baby was gone.

"You rest," her mother told her.

That mother was, for once, sweetly solicitious with her voice, in a manner bespeaking distracted attention from a proper distance, like an owner would be to its pet rat, or a nurse would be to someone who's burnt.

In her dreams at that time the question circled: Had she talked like this to me when I was small? How old was I, then, when I no longer merited it?

But an idiot baby wouldnšt be nearly so clever with its words. Some dumb novice would feel merely a wordless wondering while it slept in its crib dimly aware of the absence of something. Of what? A blankie. A thumb. A breast. A bear. A bottle. A doll. A mom.

During the time of the baby (but not after) she often dreamt of a magic spoon that was, by turns, good and bad. You never knew when it would be which. Perhaps, then--just a theory--it wasn't the spoon. Depended maybe on who was wielding it. Once the father, ensorcelled, threw the spoon at the window but nothing shattered because, in fact, it bounced. The spoon caromed off the pane and struck the cat who dashed out the door and flattened the flowerpot which spilled all the little pillbugs which rolled off in all directions and took down hundreds of blades of grass all over the lawn one by one by one by one.

At this she wondered, Since when have my nightmares turned slapstick?

In many dreams the baby wielded it. In the baby's fist the spoon appeared huge. A fat dwarf with a big lethal limb. And, what's worse, the silly baby always ignored the right use for the spoon.

"You eat," she told the baby.

But instead the baby used the spoon as a rattle, a rapper, a staff, a sword, a shooter, a knife, a hatchet, a bone, a club.

When the spoon was that last one, the club, repeatedly the baby bopped her mother harshly on the headbone.

"Don't," she told the baby.

But to the baby this was the funnest game. Hit mommy's head as if it's an empty drum that one can strike to make any number of noises that are endlessly various in their reverberations and their chilling amusements and their one-time-only singularity and their terrible hilarious lexicon of everyday tortures. Alla time thwacka, thinka, thunka, thwocka, bappa, kracka, whappa, who-a, whatta, where-a, take-a this-a, take-a that-a, ba-da-binga ba-da-boomba, sis-boom-bah.

Stop.

One dawn the baby didn't awake. It was cold in its crib. Wasn't its small body already starting to swell?

This was the saddest thing anyone had ever seen.

Is there anything not incredibly hideous about all of this?

Well. One thing. She wouldnšt ever say it aloud. It's just a tiny glimmer, really, on the edges of her lidded eyes.

That one thing was, though, now that it...shhhhhhhhhh...was all so silent but we no longer have to whisper: now she could sleep.

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Ellen Parker writes fiction. She lives in Seattle. She recently gave her first public reading of her work. Three people came up to her afterward and told her they thought she was good, to which she responded, "Get out!" If she ever gives another reading of her work, she'll try to be more gracious.

She can be reached via email at:ellenparker1@attbi.com.

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