Ice cream is bad for you
Short-short #3
Every month I’m writing a new short-short.
You ever see that old Twilight Zone episode about the kid who had a whole town under his control? Kid had godlike powers, controlling the weather, turning people into monsters, doing whatever he wanted with his mind. Kind of silly, but the gist of it was that everyone was scared of what he’d do if they stepped out of line. It ends about the way you’re expecting—with everyone dying.
I don’t know why I’m bringing that up—I guess because I was thinking about it the other day when we got in the car after Sandra’s gymnastics lesson. I helped her into her car seat while you started the engine. I slid in shotgun, and that was when the yelling about ice cream started.
(ICECREAMICECREAMICECREAMICECREAM)
Ever since her first lesson, when you’d promised her ice cream for being good and trying her best, it’s been like this. It’s getting expensive and it can’t be good for her, but—
(I’m afraid to say no)
She was singing her ice cream song, and I told her no, that it was an unhealthy, expensive habit, that we absolutely weren’t going to do it every week. You said Now come on, you have all sorts of unhealthy and expensive habits. And you brought up all the games I’d spent money on, all the junk food I ate, all the times I’d skipped brushing my teeth before bed.
And I should have pointed out that that made no sense, that it was just a pile of non sequiturs, that it was the childish approach of two-wrongs-make-a-right and it made no sense for it to come out of your mouth. But for some reason I didn’t, and my mouth started doing the same thing, saying what about your habit of watching YouTube all night and buying all those clothes you don’t need and all the time you wasted fighting with strangers on the internet, and then you slammed the car into gear and pulled out of the lot and I knew Sandra’d be getting her ice cream and I’d sealed my fate to be sharing my bed with an enemy tonight.
And I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the smile twisting onto her face, the dark clouds twisting behind her head, and I thought to myself that I hadn’t had cookies ‘n cream in a while. 🕹🌙🧸
If anyone was wondering, yes, I finished the draft. Gonna try to clean it up in the next couple months, maybe send it off to Agent Land early next year? Who knows. Depends on how much of a mess it turns out to be.
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Ahhh, the dread outcome of unintended consequences. Sometimes you just have to pick your battles, admit you've lost one (or most) and enjoy that ice cream.