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Jelly Bugs
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2018/04 - April
When my son, Ray, was two, he ate nothing but bananas, toast, scrambled eggs, and peanut butter …the beige food group.
I tried to sneak a broccoli bud or green pea into a banana slice.
“Ray. Check it out. A tree is growing in your banana boat!” That was right before a banana smear slimed my forehead and a green pea made a hole-in-one in my left nostril.
This particular morning I was down for the count with tonsillitis. I heard Ray rumbling around in the kitchen, preparing a recipe for disaster.
So I willed myself out of bed and floated to the kitchen in a cloud of medicated surreal.
Oh, look, Dali is in my hallway. “How’s it hanging, Sal?”
“Anteater,” he replied.
I found Ray on the floor building a snow fort out of a bag of flour.
Sigh.
I slid some bread into the toaster, and napped while I waited for it to brown. I buttered and jellied it, sat Ray down for breakfast, and I drifted back to bed.
Twenty minutes later I heard the screen door slam. Two minutes after that, hysterical laughter.
“Whatever it is, it can’t be good,” I thought.
I floated back down the hall. Dali left a melted Camembert hanging from a fixture before vanishing into the wall.
I found Ray sitting on the back stoop holding his toast on the flat of his hand at eye level. About a half dozen armadillidium vulgare, better known as roly polies (which aren’t bugs, by the way, but crustaceans) wobbled helplessly crust to crust. Ray watched them, entranced and delighted, yelling, “Jelly bugs! Jelly bugs!”
Several bites of toast were missing. I had no idea how many jelly bugs were downed.
In my defense I was very sick and barely conscious. So when I woke up on the floor by the back door an hour later, I chalked it up to medication.
But that doesn’t explain the crustacean crumbles in the corners of my mouth.
“Ray, did Mommy eat some jelly bugs? Ray? Ray?”
