Somewhere Over the Google

If Ham had stayed where he belonged , he would never have found the rainbow.

He wanted to share his beautiful discovery, but no one would climb as high as he had.

So, he watched the gorgeous arch of colors all by himself. The rainbow didn’t stay long. Misty clouds above the rainforest dropped down and cloudy mists rose up from the foliage. Together, they hid the rainbow from sight.

Then, very slowly and very sadly, he lowered himself hand over feet, down through the treetops, to where his six brothers and sisters were waiting on a broad branch in the all-too-familiar canopy.

“You’re going to be in trouble!” his brother Rocky yelled out when Ham’s face popped out of the thick leafy ceiling over their heads.

“Mother’s going to be mad!” his brother Mooch shouted as he swung his body down through the leaves and dangled his feet just above their frowning faces.

“We’re telling!” sang his sisters Spark, Missy, Gee, and Little Doodies when he dropped down right in front of them onto their branch. Then, with a nasty laugh, all of his brothers and sisters leapt away, from branch to branch, in the direction of home.

Ham sighed. He looked up at the tangle of leaves and branches, vines and flowers. He cocked his head at the sound of twittering birds and buzzing insects. He flared his nostrils to absorb the rainforest smells – some sweet and fragrant, some stinky and rotten. He opened his mouth and pretended to taste everything on his pink tongue.

Nothing could make him forget. He missed the rainbow.

When he finally arrived home, he was very late. He had not leapt from branch to branch. He had not swung on liana vines. He had moved very slowly, pretending to be one of those odd upside-down animals who always ignored his questions and never laughed at any of his tricks.

His brothers and sisters were waiting on the branch just below their family nest.

“We told!” Spark, Missy, Gee, and Little Doodies giggled.

“Mother’s mad,” Mooch chortled.

“You’re in trouble!” Rocky sniggered.

Ham ignored them and climbed into his nest.

His mother pointed a long finger at him, “Your brothers and sisters told me what you did. Do you have any idea how mad I am and how much trouble you are in?”

Ham sat and stared at his feet. His tail wrapped nervously around his waist. He held its tip in both hands. “I wanted to see over the treetops.”

His mother threw her head back and howled once at the puzzle of leafy branches that blocked every bit of the sky. Their rainforest neighbors echoed her angry shout. Ham heard his brothers, his sisters, lots of other monkeys, all kinds of birds, and even what sounded like a jungle cat from way down in the shadowy understory. Ham gripped his tail tightly. He looked up into his mother’s fuming eyes.

She pointed at his chest. “What are you?”.

“A monkey,” he replied.

She nodded and gestured at the branches surrounding the nest. “Yes, and where do monkeys play?”

“In the canopy,” he answered softly.

She nodded and bared her teeth. “Yes! The canopy! Play there and stay there! Never go lower…”

Ham remembered the cat’s scream and nodded vigorously.

“…and never climb higher,” his mother warned. She stared at him as though waiting for him to nod. He didn’t.

“But monkeys climb trees,” he whispered instead. “And some trees go high, much higher than the canopy, way up into the clouds, up almost to the sky. If the trees go there, why can’t we climb all the way up, too?”

His mother arched her back and howled a second time, even louder than before. Ham wanted to cover his ears with his hands, but he just held his tail more tightly.

As the echoes died, she lowered her face close to his and hissed, “Why would we, Ham? There is no reason to go up there! We have everything we need right here in the canopy!” She waved at the nest around them.

Ham looked at the stockpiled of food his family had gathered. He looked at the plump greenish-purple figs, the funny-looking starfruits, the papayas, the heaped cacao nuts, and a even a few delicious beetles creeping about. He closed his eyes and thought about how fantastic all those things tasted. He remembered all the other wonderful things he’d seen and heard and smelt on the way back to the nest.

He opened his eyes and looked sadly at his mother. Behind her, he spied the eyes of his siblings peeking over the edge of the nest. He turned his back on them and covered his face with his hands. His mother had to lean in closely to hear his whispered words.

“But we don’t have any rainbows.”

Will the Google Be Unbroken?

“Mom, what does that sign say?”

“Which one, sweetie?”

“That one over there.”

“The stop sign? It says Stop.”

“NO! The orange one!”

“Calm down, sweetie. Mommie’s driving and can’t look right now, okay? Wait until I stop.”

“It’ll be gone then! I want to know what it said! It looked like a warning sign!”

“It probably was telling everyone to be quiet and let Mommie drive,” the mother joked. She glanced at the back of the van through her baby rear view mirror to see if that satisfied her oldest child’s curiosity. It hadn’t. He was frowning.

“It DID NOT say that!” “What did it SAY!”

“Do not shout at me while I am driving! Calm down or we’re going home!”

She kept driving, trying to watch the road in front of her and the back seat at the same time. In the mirror, she saw her son flail a bit in his seat. Then, he started pushing his body up on his arms, using the arm rests of his booster seat like a gymnast’s balance beams to strain against the seat belt’s shoulder harness. His eyes bugged with the effort. His nostrils flared with each breath. He stretched his mouth into a wide line. His lips pulled back. His teeth ground together. The tendons in his neck popped out clearly on his skinny neck. His face flushed beet red. In the carseat next to him, a smaller – and for once infinitely calmer – version of himself slept peacefully, draped over the buckle straps like a little ragdoll.

“Calm down! You’re making yourself sick! And you’re going to wake up your brother!”

The van stopped at a red light. She turned and met her son’s eyes, matching him glare for glare. He almost looked like he was snarling, but he didn’t say anything. She checked her other son. He had flopped his head up and then back down again like his neck was made of taffy. He still slept, though, completely oblivious to the trouble brewing beside him. The light changed, and the mother focused on the road.

The mother worried more about her younger son waking up. From lots of experience, tantrums were highly contagious in the minivan. It didn’t matter who started it or what it was about. Soon, all three children would be bawling and screaming like tiny banshees. They didn’t even need reasons.

She flicked her eyes to the mirror. Her son was glowering at her, still flushed and breathing heavily. His jaw stuck out stubbornly. He was being quiet, but they weren’t out of the danger zone. She looked past him to the empty carseat in the very back of the van. She whispered a quick prayer of gratitude that the baby at least wasn’t there to take part in the drama. Her little girl was the lucky one, playing at home with the daddy, while she took the boys on a few errands.

Suddenly, she heard an ambulance siren coming from behind her. She slowed down to let it pass in the left lane.

“Oooh! Look, an ambulance! Do you think someone up ahead got hurt?”

Her son said nothing. She started driving again but at the next curve saw that traffic had stopped completely. She groaned in dismay but tried to distract her son again.

“Looks like there’s a wreck up ahead, sweetie. We’re going to be stuck for a while, I guess. Did you hear the siren?”

Silence answered her from the back seat.

Since the van was stopped, she looked around into eyes that still were full of a five-year-old’s fury.

He raised one hand threateningly. Sunlight from the passenger windows glinted off the shiny silver bottom of a toy car he clutched in one small fist.

“I’m gonna throw this car at you!” her son announced with all the grim severity of a judge condemning a guilty man to the electric chair.

“Throw it and you’ll be in deep trouble, mister!”

She turned back to the steering wheel and canceled her earlier prayer. If her husband had come along, he would have made up some crazy story about the sign. Her son would have bought the lie or he would have laughed at how ridiculous it was and made up something of his own.

The car suddenly whizzed by her ear. It pinged off the windshield onto the passenger seat.

“That’s it! I’m calling your dad!” She reached between the bucket seats into her purse and yanked out her cell phone. She flipped it open and hit 1 to phone home.

Her son let loose for real now. He started screaming loud enough to carry through the van’s closed windows. Drops of spit actually began flying around in the back seat as though he were a rabid dog. His brother sat up and looked around groggily for a second before he started to cry. The mother shrunk a bit in her seat and kept from looking at the cars stopped around her for fear that they could hear. She stared at the bumper in front of her and pressed her phone hard against her ear. She counted the rings. Three, and then the voice she needed to hear said, “Hey – whoa! What’s up? Sounds like you’re murdering somebody!”

“Your son’s trying to murder me! Throwing cars at me while I’m driving!” she hissed, not in the mood to joke around. She didn’t think it was possible but the screams got louder when she said that.

“Talk to your son!” she yelled into the phone. She stuck her arm back toward her oldest son. He slammed himself back and forth in the seatbelt and ignored her.

“Talk to your dad!” she screamed.

“I’m not!”

He shook his head over and over and yelled twice more, but finally he snatched the phone out of her hand. She expected him to throw it but he didn’t. He stuck it to his ear and listened for probably one second. Then, he wailed one long piercing “NO!” that vibrated the mother’s ear drums. Wincing, she focused on trying to soothe her three-year-old, who was crying but hadn’t gone full-power yet.

She had one chance with him – he had a bottomless stomach, especially after a nap, and she had a granola bar and half a bottle of water in her purse. She worked on getting him to open his mouth for a bite.

The older boy cried and snorted and slobbered. He would put the phone to his ear and then wave it around for a few minutes. Amazingly, he never closed it or threw it across the van. By the time his little brother started alternating deep sobs with messy bites of granola, he was actually listening to whatever the dad was saying . The mother felt a glimmer of hope for the first time. She also felt a twinge of jealous anger, though, and whispered another prayer. This time she asked God why he had to give the dads more power over the kids than their mothers.

Traffic still wasn’t moving when her son finally handed her the phone.

“Dad wants, to talk, to you,” he stuttered, not yet able to breathe normally after his outburst. He swiping his other arm across his wet, crimson face. It came away covered in snot and tears. He rubbed it onto his shorts. “I want, a snack, too,” he added quietly as she took the phone. He smeared both hands across his face and then rubbed his eyes. She snapped what was left of the granola bar in half and handed both boys their share. She faced forward.

Her husband was laughing when she got the phone to her ear. “It’s not funny!” she snapped, still frustrated. Then, too low for the boys to hear, she whispered, “He was awful! He nearly pegged me in the back of the head with one of his cars!”

“Yeah, that’s why I told him his cars were going to Goodwill for some other well-behaved boy to play with.”

The mother nodded. “Ah, so that’s why he let out that awful scream right at the first!” The bumper in front of her moved. Traffic finally was starting to creep forward. She sighed in relief.

“Yeah, it got his attention. Then, I just had to wait for him to calm down enough to tell me what started it all.”

“The sign.” She said too loudly. She flinched and looked at the mirror. Sometimes, a word would trigger a second round of fits. Both boys had bits of granola stuck on their faces and were poking around at the tangle of toys between their seats. They stopped as the van came level with the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles. It was only a little bumper bender, but it got both of them jabbering with excitement. “Looks like whatever you told him worked. He’s over it now.”

“Yeah –you should have just made up something about the sign. You know he never gives up when he wants to know something.”

“Yeah, I wonder where he gets all that stubbornness from!” The dad laughed. “And for your information, Mr. Smartypants, I did make something up! I told him it said for him to be quiet and let me drive!”

“That’s such a mommy lie!” the dad laughed. “No kid would ever believe that!”

“Fine! You’re the better liar. I admit it!” she chuckled, feeling much better now that she was past the wreck and the tantrum both. “What did you tell him anyway?”

“Simple. You saw it near the park, right? I think that’s what he said anyway. It was hard to tell with all the crying. Well, anyway, I told him that he was right, it was a warning sign that told people to Beware of the Flautists!”

The mother burst out laughing. “And my lie was stupid? He actually bought that?”

“Sure he did! I had to explain it, of course. And flautists can be quite dangerous, you know. Especially at the park! If you drive or walk too close, they lash out with those metal flutes. Those things sting! They can break bones, too, or slash holes in tires. You really have to watch out for those flautists, sweetie!”

The mother shook her head even though her husband couldn’t see it. “You’re awful!”

“Hey, it worked, didn’t it? I just hope you guys don’t run into some real flautists today. It might freak him out.”

“Ha, that’d serve him right!” she giggled. “Little Sister’s being really quiet. Is she playing in her room?”

“Nah, she’s been asleep ever since you guys left. I was going to do some laundry, but I decided to play games online instead since you were out goofing around with the boys…”

The mother cursed and hung up the phone. Then, she prayed a third prayer, this time to keep her from killing her husband when she finally made it home.

Hotter Than Blue Googles

“Mom! How much longer? I’m hungry!”

The little boy was shouting from his booster seat in the back of the minivan. He was five and wore a ball cap that was just a little too big since he had gotten his summer haircut.

“My hungry!” whined his little brother, who was three and strapped in his car seat in the middle of the van. He had brown hair like his grandma and tear streaks on both flushed cheeks from where he had lost a battle earlier with his mom about wearing sandals instead of green frog galoshes.

“Da-da-da!” yelled the youngest, a little girl just recently promoted to a seat where she didn’t have to ride everywhere backwards. Her hair was blonde and just long enough to start curling at the ends. She didn’t really care about being in the van so long, so long as she was buckled and could yell whenever her brothers did.

The children’s father stopped singing along with the Wiggles long enough to twist around in the front passenger seat and shout back, “Not long, guys! Not long!”

The dad wore mismatched tennis shoes to be silly and had, like the oldest child, a new summer haircut. He told everyone that the short hair made him look a little like George Clooney, but the truth was that he thought he was closer to a combination of Shrek and Peewee Herman.

“I’m hungry!” was the response from the back of the van, so the dad, when he turned back around, rapped his knuckles on his window. “Hey! Look at that big dump truck over there! Wow, it’s a big one? You guys see it? And hey! There’s a digger!”

“Cool!” yelled back the oldest, pressing his face against the window as they passed another construction site. The other two didn’t say anything. The other boy, who was a little past three years old, was looking out of the wrong window, and the little girl was too busy trying to take off her shoes to even look.

“There,” sighed the dad. He reached over and pinched the mom’s elbow. She tried to slap him with one hand, but he jerked away too quickly. He laughed, “Now, that gives us about a minute before they start thinking about food again. How much farther is this place anyway?”

“The next light is the road it’s on, so not far,” she said. She had blonde hair, like two of their children, and a little spattering of freckles on her nose and cheeks. Her shoes matched, but she didn’t mind that her husband mixed his colors up on purpose. She also liked his haircut and didn’t agree at all with the whole Ogre-Peewee thing.

They made the turn not longer after that and hadn’t gone very far, when the dad said, “Hey, this is the road the quarry’s on. Are you sure the restaurant’s this way? There’s nothing really back here that I remember.”

The mom frowned at him and turned the Wiggles’ volume down a bit. “You never listen, do you? It’s new. That’s why we got the coupons stuck on our door.” She reached down and dug between the front seats until she found a bent flyer. She waved it at the dad, but he wouldn’t take it.

“Okay, I remember now, but I’ll get sick if I read it. Did you forget that? Huh?” He poked her in the side with one knuckle as she stuck the coupons up behind the sun visor on her side.

“Stop it,” the mom laughed. “Anyway, the kids eat free and we get buy-one-get-one free. We can’t get beat that anywhere else. Plus, the ad said that it had a play land, so the kids will like it.”

“Cool.” The dad started biting his nails and then stopped. “What was it called again? Furry Chickens?”

The mom rolled her eyes and grinned. “No, Goofy. It’s Safari Chick’s – it’s supposed to have a jungle theme – monkeys, giraffes, elephants…”

“Ellies!” yelled the youngest suddenly. She liked elephants and had several stuffed toys lying all over the place back home.

“Yes! Ellies!” echoed both parents happily.

“Ellies!” everyone shouted.

The little girl threw both her arms up and yelled something else utterly unintelligible. She let go of her left sandal – which she’d been holding ever since she finally un-Velcroed it from around her ankle – flew into the air and hit the brother next to her right in the side of his head. He screamed the high-pitched distress call only a three-year-old can make, flailed his feet against the back of his dad’s seat, and lashed out with a little fist at his sister. He popped her right on the forehead. She let out a shriek like the raptors on those Jurassic movies. The dad felt his eardrums buzz with feedback. The mom swerved slightly but stayed in her lane.

“No hitting! It was an accident!” The dad shouted. “An accident, okay? You’re all okay! Stop the drama!” He twisted around his seat and tried to separate, calm, and console all at the same time. It didn’t work. The two toddlers just screamed and smacked at each other like two crazy raccoons. Then, he spun back to the front and turned the volume knob on the radio up a few spins. Over the crying and blaring kids’ music, he yelled, “Hey, the Wiggles! Let’s sing! That’ll be fun! Hey there! Shaky Shaky!”

Gripping the steering wheel with both white-knuckled hands, the mom screamed louder than anyone, “I’m turning the van around and going home if everyone doesn’t shut up! You too, Dad!”

The dad stopped singing and switched off the Wiggles. The two youngest children stopped crying and just sniffled. The oldest boy all the way in the back looked up from his action figure that he had just beheaded and made eye contact with his mom in the rear view mirror.

“Mom! Are we there yet? I’m hungry!”

Not Easy Being Googled

Rollin Great-Granma out to the porch wasn’t hard, but sittin with her was a chore that I didn’t look forward to.

Now don’t get me wrong. I loved Great-Granma, and I never once complained or even thought about makin some excuse for Mama to make Brother sit with her instead of me.

He wouldn’t do it right. He’d just sit and sulk, or worse he might whittle on that lump of wood he said was goin to be a bear once he was done and ignore Great-Granma completely.

No, he wouldn’t be good company for her. Not at all. So I never complained. I just let Mama think that I enjoyed the time on the porch every morning. And I made myself sit still and I made myself watch her. From time to time I made sure to ask her how she was or what she thought about the day, just like Mama did when she fed her meals. She’d just breathe kinda ragged or flutter her eyelids, so I’d ask again or tell her something Brother had done or some news Daddy brought back from the store. Sometimes if I felt real brave I’d reach over and hold her clasped hands, gently though and not for too long. The skin felt so smooth and thin that I feared it might split if I held on too hard. Doin that always made me shake inside, made me tremble like her hands used to when she’d reach out to kiss my cheek when I was little. She never did that anymore, but I always made sure to kiss her on the forehead when the sun got too hot and Mama called for us to come inside.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved Great-Granma. I just didn’t like sittin with her on the porch every morning. It was a chore, just like pullin weeds or feedin the dogs. It was something I dreaded, but I went out to the shed and cried that day when Daddy tied that chair up beneath the barn loft.