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Oct. 19th, 2007 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bookish_dragonExercise for the 17th October.
My brother did this weird thing with turtles. And I mean weird. Not your regular ‘turn them upside down and see whether they survive’. No, he took them to bed with him. I don’t mean in a perverse bestial getting his rocks off kind of way either. It was a constant source of amazement to me and dad, and a constant source of irritation for mom when she changed the sheets on his bed. She’d stand at the top of the stairs and yell down, “Rich! Get your ass up here and get those damn pests from eating the sheets!”. By that time Rich was plunked down in front of the telly and he never listened to any of us when he was zoned out.
He did this weird thing with turtles and we never found out why. When I finally had the courage to ask him, he got run over in the street. He didn’t die, but it was close for a while.
“She may be a bit young, but she’s not stupid.” I didn’t catch the rest. I wasn’t even supposed to be there, listening in on this conversation. Dad was talking to mom. “She’ll catch on sooner or later. We shouldn’t hide it from her.”
Mom sniffed. “I don’t see why not. She doesn’t need to know everything. We didn’t either, when we were her age.”
“Delia…” Dad sounded exasperated.
“No, Rich. We are not going to tell her. Whatever happened then is in the past. And that’s final.”
That was the day I loaned Morgan 400 bucks. He called it a loan, I called it collateral. What it was, was payment for services to be rendered. Or something like that. I didn’t have 400 bucks lying around, but I knew where to get it. With Rich still lying in the hospital, recovering, it was easy to get into the emergency money mom kept in the closet, behind the hoover.
My brother did this weird thing with turtles. And I mean weird. Not your regular ‘turn them upside down and see whether they survive’. No, he took them to bed with him. I don’t mean in a perverse bestial getting his rocks off kind of way either. It was a constant source of amazement to me and dad, and a constant source of irritation for mom when she changed the sheets on his bed. She’d stand at the top of the stairs and yell down, “Rich! Get your ass up here and get those damn pests from eating the sheets!”. By that time Rich was plunked down in front of the telly and he never listened to any of us when he was zoned out.
He did this weird thing with turtles and we never found out why. When I finally had the courage to ask him, he got run over in the street. He didn’t die, but it was close for a while.
“She may be a bit young, but she’s not stupid.” I didn’t catch the rest. I wasn’t even supposed to be there, listening in on this conversation. Dad was talking to mom. “She’ll catch on sooner or later. We shouldn’t hide it from her.”
Mom sniffed. “I don’t see why not. She doesn’t need to know everything. We didn’t either, when we were her age.”
“Delia…” Dad sounded exasperated.
“No, Rich. We are not going to tell her. Whatever happened then is in the past. And that’s final.”
That was the day I loaned Morgan 400 bucks. He called it a loan, I called it collateral. What it was, was payment for services to be rendered. Or something like that. I didn’t have 400 bucks lying around, but I knew where to get it. With Rich still lying in the hospital, recovering, it was easy to get into the emergency money mom kept in the closet, behind the hoover.
