December 27, 2018The Happy Game
was hard. Only kids could have
invented it. The girl sat on the toilet
and the boy sat on the bath mat,
criss-cross-applesauce. The father
filled a Dixie cup and stepped
into the closet. Most days,
he closed the door and walked
straight through and opened/
shut the bedroom door and gave
the pill and came right back.
Other days, he stood between the
doors a while and thought of Narnia,
or being airlocked in a passage
on the Space Station.
The girl would shake the plastic bottle,
which had once held fish oil supplements,
impatiently. It made the dad remember when
the cat went missing, and his mother
wouldn’t call for it, but shook and shook
its dry food in the little silver bowl. And
he would picture how the kids had scraped
the jelly beans across the kitchen island,
counting batches out like pharmacists.
It seemed too big, the thing that made his
wife inert and gray and distant as the mashed
potatoes everyone kept pushing farther back
inside the fridge. But he’d agreed to take
the medicine. They drank the jelly beans
with water from the cup the mother/
wife had used, because that was a rule.
I’m feeling happier, the girl
or boy would say. Me, too,
the other would agree.
Then they’d do happy things,
like scoop mud from the creek
if it was nice outside,
and turn a frisbee upside-down
to make a pottery wheel.
They played The Happy Game
until it just turned into life.
The times the father cried
were fast and quiet.
from Ekphrastic Challenge