Hearing


I got a handful of alcohol pads from the first aid kit and was wiping down the gym when Mom came back downstairs.

She wasn’t holding Electra.

Before I could panic she came over to tell me, “She fell asleep while she was getting dressed after the bath. So I put her in bed.”

“Oh. Of course.” I went back to wiping. “Thanks.”

“Mmmhmm.” She sat down at the end of the table and took a pad. While she was concentrating on the bar she was cleaning, she idly asked, “So, you don’t like Chip?”

“I didn’t like Chip,” I said. “He used to…” I skipped over bully, torment, call me names. “…Tease me. But he got into sports and left me alone after that.”

“Ah. And now, what, you pulled a thorn from his paw?”

I laughed at her little joke, but shook my head. “Someone whose opinion I respect found something to like about Chip. So I tried to see him through clearer eyes.”

“You respect Electra’s opinion?” she asked.

I stared at her. “Are we on a hidden camera? Is Electra watching, to see if I give you different answers to questions she asks me?”

Mom smiled. Not like she’d been caught out, but that she appreciated my reaction. “I just thought… There were a few surprises today. I don’t want to think we ignore you like….they… ignored Jennifer.”

“No risk of that,” I said. “There’s this dotted line in my head.” She stopped wiping and stared at me. “Anything I do, I’m evaluating if my parents will be amused at my antics, proud of my ingenuity, or concerned that I’ve crossed the line.”

We shared a smile. She squeezed my hand again. Then she gathered up all the empty packs and used pads and walked off to the kitchen to throw them away. I tried to decide if I should leave the gym set up.

Dad leaned through the doorway. “You DO know that the ‘where your child is at’ phone call is way, way over the line, right?”

“Yes, sir. That is NOT my goal.”

“Okay, then,” he said.

I decided to leave it up, in case she woke up angry tomorrow.

I showered and went to bed. And it’s not that I don’t trust Mom, or that it’s not obvious where the bedroom is in Electra’s cage, but I did get real close and listened.

I heard her breathing, slow and regular.

I climbed into bed and turned the light off.

Then I lay there in the dark, thinking about that belch. How I’d tell the story. The look on her face. Nothing about her emotional state. ‘She’d worked up quite an appetite on the bars, and when we finally got food, she crawled into the pizza….’

Or maybe that joke about the guy who fell into a beer vat and drowned… After taking three trips to the bathroom to pee.

‘So, we had ordered four pizzas, and she got into one of them somehow…’ She fell into the pizza box and had to eat her way to freedom…

While I toyed with the story line, I was swallowing air. To see if I could come close to expressing the majesty of that burp.

‘Now, imagine that much gas coming out of a belly this big…’

I started to giggle at the memory. And forgot to belch. And I felt the air… Move. I desperately belched, but only a tiny squeak came out. I’d waited too long.

I’d lost a belching contest exactly this way once in middle school. But ten minutes later, in Science class, I started, finished and won the fart contest.

I’d immediately pointed to the aquarium on the shelf beside me and said, “That frog must eat a LOT of flies!”

Not my finest hour, as far as material goes, but I was proud of how quickly I’d thought of it.

“I remember that!” a voice said in the darkness. Electra was awake, and she’d somehow relived that memory with me.

“I’m going to go sit in the bathroom,” I said. “Until it’s safe.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t judge you for farting in my vicinity.”

“I’m not worried about judging, I’m worried more about… Mining Canaries.”

“Oh.” I got out of bed as she came to an agreement with me. “Yeah, I can support that.”

I was already out in the hall by then.



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Index

29. Listening

31. Scale-Free View