I Made a Mess by Brooke Fox

            The fire-sweeping fury of the Chaldean culture, which runs rampant in their women, never had any hesitations in my mother’s character. When I was about three or four, an impish little spawn of the Devil himself, an incident occurred that provides a fair illustration of my hellish tendencies. The quintessential shopper’s binge, which seemed always to hold a great allure for my mother, was purpose-bent on that carefree day when she took me shopping.

After spending two hours playing the part of the good child, as I’d endured minutes on end of torturous searches through a hodgepodge of shoes and clothing aisles that looked like the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory turned around, I finally couldn’t take it anymore. I had to dispatch from all the nonsense. Looking around, I realized that we were in a multi-faceted part of the store and, in the distance, spotted the largest pyramid of toilet tissue I had ever seen. I breathed a sigh of relief. Here, finally, was something worth investigating, I thought to myself. After glancing quickly around and taking note of the fact that my mother was out of sight, I walked surreptitiously over to the pile, not believing my good fortune. Feeling that it would be unforgivable not to touch something on this once-in-a-lifetime display, I reached down and pulled out one of the larger tissue paper rolls from the bottom. I felt the pyramid begin to tremble. I looked up. “Uh oh,” I whispered.

If anyone had ever seen my mother furious, their level of admiration for the finesse with which she could portray that quality would have been squashed to pieces by the time she took me home that day. So impressed by this phenomena was my grandmother, who happened to be the only witness to the exchange, that the coined term “her eyes spit fire” made its way into nearly every family recounting of the event. My mother took my arm and shook me, and exclaimed in a voice that matched the rest of her ire,

“Tell your grandmother what you did!” Women’s wiles took over, and I watched as my grandmother’s face gradually smoothed over into one of feigned ignorance, until the only part of it that was bona fide was her twinkling blue eyes.

“Why, what did you do, Honey?” she asked me. I looked at her impishly, my face covered in a gooey sticky substance from something I had eaten earlier. A big grin spread across my face. I said,

“I made a mess.”