Is that the fourth? Or the fixth?
Fixth?
Is that a number?
“Well?” my father booms. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Well, what do you have to say for yourself?” I mimic back in a high, whiny voice.
My father’s eyes bulge.
That’s it.
I shall act out until he has a stroke.
And then I shall use my magical powers vested in me as a father of two teenage boys who steal animals and eat ridiculous numbers of hamburgers and have very fine women sent to jail, and I shall annoy my mother to death as well.
I burp.
The overwhelming churning in my gut thanks to the butter and cheese in the pasta that I requested plain comes out of my arsehole in a long, deep fart that reverberates throughout the room.
’Tis a good evening to have consumed dairy.
This will aid in my plan to murder both of my parents without laying a hand on them. “How’s your—hic!—blood pressure?” I ask my mother.
Smiling, of course.
Waving my wine at her.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” my father snaps.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I snipe back, falsetto.
This is fun now that I’m getting into it.
“You will cease speaking to me that wayright now?—”
I interrupt his tirade with another long, satisfying release of the gas bubbles tormenting my midsection.
“Stop that right now,” my mother snaps.
“Stop that right now,” I parrot.
Except that’s not me parroting my mother.
I have not, in fact, opened my mouth at all, other than to sip wine, and it would be impossible for me to be parroting my mother while drinking wine.
Which means that someone else has parroted my mother.
Clearly this is the case, because they’re both gawking at something over my head.
“Howdareyou,” my father roars as my mother half rises and adds, “Who the bloody hell do you think you are?”
“Fuck off,” comes a very cheerful, very lovely, very painful-to-hear voice.
A voice that makes my drunken heart pitter-patter and my pride have its first self-flagellation at the next long toot to come from my arsehole.
I’m terrified to turn around.
