MORNING
You’re at breakfast, okay? Your mom is cutting the grapefruit with one of those weird bent and jagged knives, right? It’s squirting all over the place, including your dad’s shirt, and he’s saying, “Hey now, watch the fine poly blend.” And you’re looking at the paper, and of course there are stories with the names Loomis and Dwyer all over the thing, and you push it away before you give in to the temptation to see if any of them have the name Cleary in them, and you take a sip of pineapple juice and a bite of your Lucky Charms, which you’re almost never allowed to have, and you announce, “I’ve been writing a few stories in my diary and I’m going to write one today about a girl made out of candy canes, but someday I’m going to write one about a wombat with glowing fur,” and your brother, who hasn’t said a thing in close to a week, looks up from his bowl of Life—what can I say, the kid loves Life—and he says, “You’re writing about what?”