My brothers and I are very lucky that we were all born together, because nobody else will have anything to do with us. All the kids think that we are weird. Like my brother Sparrow, who wears the participation medal that he won in day camp around his neck every day, will show anyone his penis if they ask him.
Robin got to take the hamster home for the weekend. The hamster escaped and it most likely got accosted and murdered by some rats in the alleyway. On account of that, none of the other kids would talk to him after that.
The science teacher is always picking on Robin. He gave him a zero on his assignment about his favourite animal, and he said that he wished that he could have given him less. My mother said that chicken pox affected him harder than it had the rest of us.
Jay threw a ruler out the window in math class and even he had no idea why in the world he did that. The teacher told him to go sit outside the class until he figured out why he did. He sat there for three hours and he still didn’t know.
The teachers in our school give my brothers a different diagnosis each month, it seems. For example, once Robin had ADHD and Jay had something called dysgraphia, and then the next month they swapped. Sometimes they all have the same diagnosis and sometimes they have different ones.
I guess I am the smart one. I base that in part on the fact that I like to read a lot. I don’t only like books though. I like to read things like the backs of cereal boxes and the warning labels on bottles of poison. I love reading the IKEA catalogue. I enjoy discovering new words too. But most of all, I like to smell books. You know, I can stick my face in the spine of a book and leave it there, breathing in and out, for hours. Despite my extra knowledge, my mom loves us all just the same though. That’s the way that she is.
My mother starts singing along to a song on the loudspeaker in line at the grocery store. But she sings it too slow. So she is still singing once the song is over.
On the way home, the garbageman whistles at all the women. But he doesn’t whistle at her. I ask my mother how in the world she got so fat.
Was it because she had eaten too many cupcakes? Was it because when she was little, her own mommy had only ever given her hamburgers and milkshakes from McDonald’s?
She says no. She says that the reason she is so fat is that she always held so many things in. She was so shy when she was little that she was afraid to express herself. She would never put her hand up in class, so she kept all these ideas inside of her. And each one popped like a kernel of popcorn, until she was like a big bag of microwave popcorn.
My mother says that there are all sorts of opportunities that I have that she did not have as a girl. She says that she always had to stuff her bra when she was little. She says that she had to laugh at all the boys’ jokes all the time, even if they weren’t funny at all. She says that she wishes she hadn’t, because she wouldn’t have as many wrinkles now and her teeth wouldn’t be so yellow.
When she won an award for her handwriting when she was in Grade Three, she thought that for sure after that happened she was going to make something out of her life. But she didn’t. She decided to have a boyfriend instead.
On account of the general conditions of the kitchen, we eat the ham in the living room while watching TV. My mother does not know how to clean up a kitchen. She has been trying to straighten up ours for like eight years, but the more she goes at it, the messier it gets. It is impossible now, cause there are too many dishes. The counters look like a landing pad for all sorts of dirty spaceships. We don’t know why there are more dishes in our sink than in any other place in the world. Sometimes we all pitch in to wash the dishes, but then we get bored and we go do something else.
After we eat and we’re all crammed together on the couch, we don’t pay attention to the TV that’s still on and we beg our mother to read to us from The Guinness Book of Records. I think that it must be so lonely to be the world’s tallest man, with your head way up in the clouds like that. We all feel so sorry for the tallest man that we all start to cry. We hope we never grow like that. It is much better to be ordinary.
My mother lies about what our first words were, when we ask her. But I can’t blame her. She does it to make us happy. She tells my brother that his very first words were, “Beam me up, Scotty.” His face gets red because he’s so proud of himself.
We beg our mother to count our toes. We don’t know why we like it so much, other than that it reminds us of having been born.
My mother didn’t throw out those little tiny jars of food that you buy when you have babies. They were too cute to get rid of. And if you don’t ever chuck them out, you would not even begin to believe how many little baby jars you will have. I am so glad that she kept them all because we keep everything tiny inside of them. Like one bottle is for buttons and one is for thumbtacks. We are like scientists, because it is in the nature of scientists to collect tiny things.
When we were tiny little babies, we were all inside her belly and it was like we were all inside of separate baby jars. I was mushed-up peaches. Jay was mushed-up peas. Sparrow was mushed-up pears. And Robin was beef stew melee.
My favourite time of the night is when after the news they let the balls fall out of the lotto machine. That means that it is time to go to bed. The boiler is making a gurgling noise, like your tummy makes in class before lunchtime. It doesn’t keep me up for long, though. We are so happy here, I have to make sure that we don’t leave.
I have to garden today. I have a little square at the community garden right behind the Children’s Library. My brothers did not understand why I wanted to sign up for that type of thing. But I always have to have a project. I cannot keep still. I audition for all the plays at school even though I never get a part.
“Goodbye!” I scream again at the front door, but nobody answers.
I find a Virgin Mary statue sitting on one of the window frames in the hallway. She just sits looking out of it like a sad little old lady. I decide to bring her to my little garden. She’s actually kind of heavy and she keeps being asked to be put down to walk. Most of the other gardens don’t have statuettes or things like that in them. The gardeners are too busy using all the room that is there to grow all sorts of vegetables and things to eat. I gather up some broken bricks and carry them over to place them around the rose.
I have a rose bush that has no flowers on it. It is nothing but an ugly little shrub with thorns on it, but I believe in it. I know that it will be beautiful someday. I sit on an upside-down laundry bucket and read The Little Prince to the rose bush.
I till the soil for an hour. My favourite thing is to look underneath the rocks and see everything that lives there. The soil is crawling with worms and earwigs and centipedes.
You would not ever believe how many different species of beetles there are. They have these entire complicated cities with their own miniature subway systems and roadways and underpasses. They have mossy little condominiums where they can have babies. It’s really like another Tokyo under my bare feet. They do so much work! They are busybodies. They are just like me: too busy to make trouble.
When I get back to the apartment, there are a bunch of naked people drawn in chalk all over the cement in the front of the building. Jay must have drawn them. He isn’t a very good artist or anything, like he can’t do animals or horses, but he is very gifted at drawing naked people. The drawings are doing really dirty things too, like oral sex. A man who lives across the hall from us shakes his head when he steps over them. I rub out the chalk people with the bottom of my running shoes as fast as I can.