Week Thirty-six(June 29- july 4) Topic: Cannibalism
Winner: Sunny
Scientific Exploration Into Knitting, Mischief, Rodents and Cannibalism.
By Sunny
Aunt Alison’s visits are hell. If you took the stereotypically awful aunt from any book written in the last fifty years and dressed her in a maroon hat shaped like a pork pie and you would have Aunt Alison. She comes to stay at our house for about a week every couple of months—to parent us. She had decided that your parent clearly weren’t doing a good enough job of it so she would make her visits to see what new level of evilness we had sunk to and to try and bring some saintly behavior back to us.
Her visits meant that all of us boys had to wear button-up shirts and the girls all had to wear skirts, that the Slipknot and Seether CDs had to be packed away in boxes under the beds and that we couldn’t go on Facebook while Aunt Alison was around because she was convinced that it was a santanical dating sight. And at the end of every trip Aunt Alison would try to convince our parents that all our friends were bad influences and that we should be banned from seeing them.
Every year Mom and Dad tried to not offend her but they never took ant of her advice.
* * *
I was sitting in the utility room with the washer and dryer playing a hand-held Gameboy when I heard the arrival of the dreaded and infamous Aunt Alison. I shoved the Gameboy out of sight in the pocket of my hideously pleated pants and swung my feet down from the wall. Aunt Alison had this thing were she would go through the entire house and find each of us to say hello*.
I heard her make her way through the ground floor, saying hello to John, Calli, Jack, Lilly, Morgan, Caleb and of course Mom and Dad. Then she headed upstairs and greeted/kept tabs on Logan, Rachel, Bella, Neal and Maria. She had moved her things into the guest bedroom before she recounted in her head and realized she had missed one.
“Where’s Matt**?” I hear Aunt Alison say.
“He could be in the basement. He has a project going down there,” Mom answered.
The ancient steps creaking and the sound of someone hitting their head on the too-low beam announced Aunt Alison’s arrival. It took her several minutes to find me sitting in the utility room trying not to laugh.
“Knitting?” This was Aunt Alison’s way of starting a conversation apparently. No ‘hello’ or ‘how are you?’ Just ‘knitting?’ with one eyebrow raised.
“Yep, Calli’s teaching me***,” I said, barely able to keep a straight face as I accidentally made I giant knot out of the lavender yarn.
“I see,” she said. Since she couldn’t find anything to criticize about she turned around and went back upstairs.
My peace in the basement didn’t last long though; Bella came stampeding down the stairs to leap into the utility room and yell “Guess what?!?!?!”
“What?” I asked with as little enthusiasm as I could muster.
“I’m physic!! As soon as Aunt Alison pulled up in the driveway I got sick!” she said, bouncing up and down
“That’s fantastic.”
She wasn’t detoured at all by my total lack of interest, instead she grinned some more and noticed the ball of fuzzy crap in my lap.
“What are you doing with Calli’s hat?”
I glanced down. “Oh, is that what its spose to be? I thought it might be a wooly bladder****.”
Bella made a face. “You’re mean. And that hat was supposed to be for me.” She left to go and spread her news about being physic throughout the house.
I followed soon after because my Gameboy battery died. I was able to sneak past Aunt Alison and up to the third floor where I shared a room with my older brother Neal.
I jogged along the hallway to my bedroom and gave Maria’s guinea pig, JoJo, a kick*****. Damn it, JoJo wasn’t even supposed to leave Maria and Lilly’s room! I wasn’t a fan of rodents but I hated guinea pigs****** in particular and JoJo in more particular.
I leapt into my room and threw a pillow at the back of Neal’s head before flopping onto my bed.
Neal threw the pillow back at me and I caught it and shoved it under my head.
“You know Neal,” I said. I had just made eye contact with Nibs, Neal’s pet hamster. “If your hamster was a human, it would be a cannibal.”
Neal looked over at Nibs too. “Probably. But he’d eat you first.”
“Probably. Gosh! I hate rodents so much!” I complained. “And I have to live in a house with sixteen of them, and one of them is living eighteen inches from my head when I’m asleep!”
“You and Aunt Alison have that in common,” Neal commented.
“What, we have cannibalistic rodents living within two feet of our heads?” I asked.
“No, she hates rodents. Way more than even you.” It was probably at this point that the idea first formed in my head but I was distracted from it by Neal adding, “At least you don’t share a room with Caleb, one of his mice just had another five babies.”
I was sufficiently grossed out by the thought of this that The Idea was pushed to the way back of my mind. It wasn’t until dinner when a tiny voice******* reminded me of the idea.
The Idea wasn’t particularly amazing or even imaginative but it was a crime against Aunt Alison so it was worth it. We had been putting up with her for the last fifteen years so we might as well have some fun with it.
* * *
One good thing about having twelve kids in the family is that no one notices if you disappear from the table after fifteen minutes. Which was exactly what I did. It took forty-five minutes to transfer all sixteen******** rodent pets to the guest bedroom where Aunt Alison was staying.
By the time I was done I felt fairly proud of myself. I had arranged the animals in a most artistic way; the mice were gathered around the model of Noah’s Ark, the guinea pigs were in her slippers*********, the hamsters were on the bed and the rest I had allowed to wander around on the floor. I smiled; perfect.
I was able to return downstairs and slip into the kitchen unnoticed and I smiled the entire evening, waiting for her to go to bed and for the screams to start. I knew that she wouldn’t leave or anything, she was way to determined and annoying to do anything as nice as that, but she would be twitchy for the rest of her visit**********.
*According to her it was to say hello but I had a feeling that it was to try and catch us in the act of doing something or to try and figure out what we did when she wasn’t there (I had chosen to be in the utility room, pretending to knit to confuse her).
**That’s me.
***Calli wasn’t doing any such thing—probably because I had no desire to learn to knit. She had, however, (unknowingly) donated her latest knitting project to the cause.
****I know. I’m quoting Harry Potter. Bella didn’t know that though.
*****It wasn’t really a kick, it was more of a punt. JoJo only flew about two or three feet and when he landed he was clearly in a good enough mood to glare at me for a couple of seconds and then waddle to Maria’s room to eat some more lettuce.
******Like, honestly, what moron bred it in the first place?? It combines the worst attributes of rodents and pigs!
*******The voice may have been Benjamin, who I haven’t heard from in a really long time.
********There was twenty-one of them if you count each of the tiny hairless baby mice as in individual being.
*********This is how much I hate guinea pigs, that I would actually place them in the tenth level of hell; a place were Aunt Alison’s feet spent a great deal of time.
**********The End.
More by Sunny:
http://www.goodreads.com/story/list/1814...
More from this contest: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1645...
