Why you crazy talkin’ cyclone boy! Get your hair out of the soup bowl! For the love of God, why can’t you tie it back? Just to spite me of course. That’s why! Cyclone boy pushed his chair back from the table and got up. He went into the living room and laid down on the old red and black checkered carpet and rolled around. Damnit, momma thought. I did it again. The reason I got mad is cause I wanted him to eat his soup properly and now i ruined it again cause now he got up and left the table, and now if I say come back to the table he won’t cause I am the one who drove him off in the first place. Now it’s all ruined yet again. I have to figure out how to deal with these situations without getting upset. Time and time again, I tell myself that and then I up and do it again. Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
Momma reflected some more, staring at the half full bowl of tomato soup on the table and cyclone boy in the background, rolling around on the carpet in the dim light of the crusty old living room lamp. Outside the pain the ass dog from next door was barking again. Such a terrible creature, that one. The owner should find a holistic vet and take that dog out of it’s doldrums, momma thought. She had once thought about a career in veterinary science, but dropped out after two years. She got too far behind because she insisted on reading every word of all the text books. “Well, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?” she had squawked at her daughter when Lucy had tried to tell her mama she needed to skim over some parts. That’s how you do it. You gotta skim here and there, and just take in the general notion of the content, otherwise, you won’t be able to catch up, Lucy had told her. “And so’s I’m not supposed to know what I’m doing and then end up killing someone’s pet kitty by mistake?”
Lucy gave up but Momma did eventually drop out of school without getting her degree and now here she was with Lucy’s son Cyclone Boy rolling around on the carpet and a barely touched bowl of tomato soup across from her on the table. The smell of the soup made her think of that one time they had been staying in a yurt for the summer. It was on some land donated to a friend of the family from the Tortoise Bread Company when they went out of business once everyone went gluten free. They had a silo full of wheat and no sales, and they liquidated everything by donating it to employees and their families.
The yurt was right outside of St Joseph Missouri and they got there by floating down the Missouri River from Omaha. They had a couple rafts tied together with rope and some plastic furniture scattered about. Cyclone Boy was just a baby then, about one year old, Momma thought, as he had just learned to walk and was wandering over the other side of the raft and walked right into the river. Lucy’s boyfriend at the time, Max, who was incidentally not Cyclone Boy’s Dad, stood on deck drinking a bottle of beer and yelled out, “Hey you’re boy’s gone into the river.” Momma leapt up and jumped in the water and pulled out the child who had been lying there face down in the water, but only for a few seconds.
Well, after the shouts and recriminations subsided, they ended up at the land the yurt was on and rowed the boat ashore. They unpacked and set up a little cook stove and all they had to make was tomato soup, so that’s what they had for supper that night. I’m sure there was crackers as well, Momma thought. There must have been crackers.
The next morning they hopped out of their sleeping bags and headed down to Contrary Lake to wash themselves and clean up. They had planned the trip a while ago when Lucy was pregnant with Cyclone Boy and now they had finally seen it to fruition and they were giddy and glad as they bathed in the lake beneath the huge piles of cracked wheat situated by the lakeshore.
This is what Momma remembered as she sat at the table and felt sorry for herself. She got a hold of her feelings and called out gently to Cyclone Boy, I’m going to warm this soup back up and you come up here and have you some. She took the bowl to the kitchen and dumped its contents back in the soup pot. Cyclone Boy crawled up to the table and sat down, tying his long stringy hair back with a simple black elastic band. Momma brought him the soup and some ham and cheese on a plate and they ate their supper in peace.
THE MOSSY BOG 