The Napkin Fleet

I really should stop posting my literature assignments on here, but... I found somewhere that "the worst thing you write is better than the best thing you don't write." Assuming we're not talking about random lousy gossip about pig's foot syndrome, I guess we can be willing to spin with it. After all, "the world, you see, keeps turning, and we must turn with it." Again, assuming we aren't including spineless conformation here, we can go along with that as well. So. I wrote something.
Anyway, I'm not so happy with it. But feedback would be nice.

Kleptomania is an irresistible urge to steal items of trivial value. People with this disorder are compelled to steal things, generally, but not limited to, objects of little or no significant value, such as pens, paper clips, paper and tape. Some kleptomaniacs may not even be aware that they have committed the theft.

Two years ago my sister Ema crossed a road and never made it to the other side. All I remember was golden hair and blue dress flying across the street like a marionette, the screeching of tyres and cars honking maniacally. Next came the screaming, which became wailing which, later on, slowly merged into some sick form of internal cavity. Then, one day, with the gradual fluttering open of the largest pair of coffee-coloured eyes, the world unfroze and started moving again. Just like that.

Ema was almost the same Ema she was before the accident. She still smiled the same way; even more often than before. In fact, she hardly ever stopped smiling, and she became a lot more musical too. She made up rhymes and tunes to express herself when she was upset or frustrated.

Of course, we were told, slight personality changes were to be expected. Ema was considered extremely lucky to have recovered at all after the degree of traumatic head injury she had incurred. The only thing that really gave her away was this new habit she had developed: stealing.

Ema wasn’t a bad person. It was compulsive. Half the time she didn’t even realize she was doing it.

Despite being outgoing, cheerful and pretty, Ema wasn’t very popular. People have a way snubbing those they can’t sort in a category, the way carrots are dumped with “vegetables” and apples with “fruits.” Along comes some exotic specimen like jaboticaba and they have absolutely no idea what to do with it. I guess that’s how it was with Ema. She was an enigmatic jaboticaba. You couldn’t put her into a box because there was no box big enough. School kids were the worst. They didn’t like the way their rubbers and pencils kept disappearing. Ema had lots of friends before the accident. They dropped her like a rotten potato after it. So we stuck together during school too; even though was an unwritten rule that you didn’t fraternize with siblings, which put the two of us right at the bottom of student food chain. The teachers thought it was sweet. They felt sorry for Ema; you could tell. They even made her a student counsellor. It was a coveted position; you got juvenile jurisdiction and a shiny badge. The teachers weren’t too impressed, though, when they found, on the morning of presentation, that all the silver badges had mysteriously disappeared. There was a search for them, but to no avail. They were proudly stuck to the back of our bedroom door at home.

Mrs Priscilla Lynch was a nasty, old, half-blind hag who ran the local restaurant, next to the newsagency where Mum worked. She was worse than all of the students at school put together. Mrs Lynch was the type of woman who was pretty poor and yet lived haughtily with an air of self-styled aristocracy. She was crooked, mean and had sharp features that resembled a magpie. Last July, Ema took her precious pearl necklace. Mrs Lynch hissed and spat like a tomcat, but Ema couldn’t return it. She’d lost the necklace somewhere in her maze of hoarded possessions. The old witch threatened to call the police. I panicked. The police, we could handle. My mother, we couldn’t. She would have a nervous breakdown. So Mrs Lynch and I made a deal. Service, in return for silence. Which is how I ended up washing dishes and scrubbing toilets at Priscilla’s Pizzeria with no wage whatsoever, as I worked through my ninth month of redeeming the thievery of a pearl necklace that was probably made of plastic anyway.

Mum thought Ema and I were at soccer training after school. It was a feeble lie, but she never asked questions. She had grown tired, and sad and thin.

When Ema was in hospital, Dad pulled Mum and I together and hugged us tightly. He told us that it was the darkest time of his life too; but we would get through it, somehow, as a family. The day our prayers were answered and my little sister woke up, sun shot through our shadowy cocoon like lightning. We came back to life.

Then the shouting started again. Dad couldn’t stand the way his socks kept vanishing. He couldn’t stand the way his splitting image of a daughter smiled absently and hummed tunes when he demanded answers. A year later, he took off in the middle of the night. Of course, Mum blamed herself. She willed herself to be strong for both Ema and I, but she failed. She became an anxious bundle of nerves that exploded at the slightest touch. Mum couldn’t let Dad go. Even now I still caught her whispering to that gigantic hunk of diamond; her wedding ring. She was just like that crazy bald thing from a book I once read. I was thirteen and had to grow up instead.

Priscilla’s Pizzeria was not exactly beloved. The atmosphere was mildewy, the owner crabby and the portions stingy. But it was the only place to eat for miles around, so every now and then when people’s fridges were empty and every last scrap of bread crust finished; they were forced to grit their teeth and pay the damp old shop a visit. During the day, when the restaurant was empty, Mrs Lynch would set us to work while she went for an afternoon snore.

The moment she left, the dingy kitchen became a hall of dreams. In between sweeping floors and stacking plates, Ema and I would practice magic tricks. She stood on chairs and pretended to sing opera while I cheered and clapped a full-house theatre’s worth of applause, and threw her bouquets of old parsley. Pizzeria paper-napkin airplanes zoomed through the air and out the window and Ema and I battled each other in pirate swordfights with long sticks of celery. We sat on upside down tables and paddled with invisible oars through ocean’s waves and treacherous currents. Then, when the waters calmed, we would lie on our backs and stare at the ceiling. Sometimes, if we were lucky, the cracked white plaster would crumble away, and an endless night of stars swept across the sky.

Then Mrs Lynch would wake up, rant, flare her nostrils, condemn imagination and send me to scrub the toilets. But even that grotesque job was made bearable by the amount of amusing graffiti that covered the stalls. Things like “Jack is a weener” and “Tessa is so hot.” I would stand for ages and just read; taking it all in. I wondered what happened to Jack and Tessa. Maybe they would go on and become great people, but here they would always remain as nothing more than a scribble on the toilet wall where people poured out their choicest insults and deepest secrets. I pulled a pen from my pocket and stared at the stalls of inspiration, but I couldn’t think of anything memorable or interesting. So I just told the truth: “My name is Cosimo Kennedy and I wish you people would clean up after yourselves.”

Months passed. I counted exactly six comments ridiculing my name, and nine other colourful replies. Things were going almost peacefully at the pizzeria.

Until one day, this big bloke in a suit and his wife came in. The little woman was carrying a pink bag that jingled with money and cosmetics. Ema immediately hurried over with the menu and an obliging smile. The man grunted, licked his lips, and played with his moustache as he ordered.

Ema promptly arrived with the pizzas. The pizzeria had lighting fast service. That was because everything was frozen. The big man coughed loudly.

“Excuse me, but I didn’t order olives.”

“Hmm?” Ema muttered blankly. And then her hand slipped. It closed around a compact mirror and attempted to stow it into her pocket, before it was forcefully snatched up.

There was an explosion of disproportionate outrage. The man roughly wrenched the mirror away, almost twisting off her wrist. Ema flailed and screamed. He bellowed hideous insults at her. My teeth ground into an involuntary snarl and I could feel my blood boiling like acid. I lunged at him. I don’t even remember what I did or shouted. Only it was the loudest, angriest and blindest with hatred I had ever been.

 “Shut up, you insolent boy! This is criminal! Thievery!” The man roared, spit flying into my face. His wife started crying hysterically, screaming that she’d been violated and attacked.

“Calm down! Please, calm down!” Mrs Lynch rasped loudly, her attempts at soothing the customers serving only to increase the chaos exponentially. She turned to us. “STUPID HARE-BRAINED DELINQUENTS,” she yelled, “LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!”

If there had been a small part of me that hadn’t been consumed with absolute rage, I may have looked back and raised an eyebrow at the violent screaming war we had launched over a simple compact mirror. And it had become violent. The man’s silly wife was squealing like a parrot that had been trodden on, kicking her limbs around ludicrously. The old hag had been knocked over, and fell to the floor with a loud thud. Chunks of ham and pineapple flew into the air and came raining down on us while the big man, the life of the party, sent a Margherita pizza spinning, where it splattered against the window. Tomato sauce slid down the window like blood.

Not surprisingly, the noise we were making attracted quite a lot of attention. Someone came running in from the building next door. She flung open the door, and light poured into the gloomy room, chasing shadowy cobwebs from their corners. For a moment, we were blinded by her silhouette. She looked like a superhero, even in her knitted red sweater and jeans.

It was Mum.

I shut up immediately and tried to inconspicuously inch behind a menu. Miraculously enough, everyone else quietened down as well. I didn’t know my mother had such commanding presence. Her eyes went wide as she took in the scene. She didn’t say anything at all, just stood there like a stunned mullet.

“Er. Hi mum,” I offered awkwardly, trying to break the ice.

A bit of tomato sauce dripped off the man’s moustache. He straightened up pompously.

“Madame, are these your offspring?” he demanded. When he received no response, he pointed at Ema. “This young lady attempted to steal a very valuable possession of my wife’s. I believe charges could be pressed in a situation such as this. The girl is clearly a dangerous, sticky-handed criminal!”

Curled up against the wall, Ema looked about as dangerous as a baby unicorn.

Mum didn’t even look at him. She just bore her icy eyes like laser beams, straight into my brain. To say it was unnerving would have been a dire understatement.

“Cosimo. Ema. What are you doing here...? I thought you were at drama club.”

“Soccer practice. Soccer practice, Mum.”

“Well,” she said stiffly, “I don’t see any grass.”

I murmured some pathetic excuse, but didn’t get far. My mind was a whirring reel of film, spinning out of control trying to come up with something... anything. But before I could string together a coherent sentence, Mrs Lynch had hoisted herself up using a rickety chair; her eyes glinting maliciously under the straggly monobrow. She ran her tongue over cracked, rotting teeth and took a deep breath.

The words that spewed from her mouth were corrosive. The old hag viciously detailed everything, right down to the dimensions of that dastardly piece of jewellery that had condemned us in the first place. More than anything else, I wanted to put an end to the mordant bile that was the end of us all; but I was too consumed by dread to do anything but gawk. The lies we had lived under for more than a year had been lifted, yet I was feeling anything but relieved. I watched my mum; fearful she would burst into tears or even collapse from shock.

She did neither. Instead, she glared at Mrs Lynch very squarely.

“My children are no longer within your service,” she said quietly.

The old lady cackled; her saggy skin stretched taut across her face.

“I’m afraid you aren’t in a position to decide that,” she grinned, “Those pearls were precious. Your children owe me over a thousand dollars! After all, an agreement’s an agreement.”

“Agreement?” I interrupted angrily, “you’ve just gone and blown off the whole deal – ”

“Quiet, Cosimo.” Mum demanded. And then she did something incredible.

Calmly, she slowly removed the ring from her finger. The gigantic diamond shone brightly and sent little rainbows dancing all over the room. I don’t know why, but the moment Mum took the thing off, she looked about twenty times taller than she did before. Mrs Lynch’s eyes went as round as saucers. The man started drooling.

“Consider it payed off,” Mum said very coolly. Then she flicked the diamond into the air with nonchalant casualness. The ring spiralled and twisted like a suspended ballerina. Mrs Lynch and the big man made a dive for it. Mum grabbed my arm, and helped a slightly dazed Ema up from the ground. Together we walked out of the pizzeria; leaving the others squawking and clawing like wild seagulls over picnic scraps.

We decided to go for a holiday; Mum, Ema and I. Not very far, of course, we couldn’t afford that. But the local beach was as good a place as any other. We built sandcastle cities on the shore and watched them wash away with the tide, ate our way through giant ice cream sundaes with mint choc chips, and fell over laughing at nothing and everything. With one hand in Mum’s and the other in mine, Ema’s stayed obediently by her side. After the sun went down, we lay down on the sand and gazed up with wonder at an infinite sky where nothing wafted between us and the floating sea of stars above.

Ema gently nudged me.

“Look, Cosimo!” she whispered, pointing.

Maybe it was just our imagination but, for a second there, I could have sworn I saw a small fleet of paper-napkin airplanes fly across the moon.