I’m crouched down to clean up a game-closet mess on the kitchen floor when I spot a long, grey-brown, cylindrical abnormality looking like nothing so much as a giant turd with a shiny, grape-like skin lying unassumingly on the tile.
Could my child have done this? What about the diapers? How would Traci not have noticed?
I lean closer to smell it. It is pinched off to a point at one end. It is not a regular roundness all the way down, but has a few wrinkles, or slightly inward curves down its length, which is close to four inches. It really looks like nothing but a piece of excrement.
But it doesn’t smell. I sniff, with no result. How could that be? I stare, inches away, confused by its lack of stench. What could it be?
I reach out a tentative finger. I have kids; I change diapers; I’m not as squeamish as once I would have been. It looks just like the dog “mines” we cleaned out of the back yard with a shovel and plastic grocery bag growing up, one of the light ones, after it’s been in the yard a day or so, but not to the point where it’s dried to dirt-clod consistency, impossible to scoop up without it crumbling to dust. But even those I wouldn’t touch with my fingers.
At my touch the object stirs, wriggles, contracts a little. It’s alive! But no, now it’s inert again. Comprehension starts to dawn on me. I reach out again, poke it, it rolls, contracts a little more.
This used to be a monkey. Where are the marker-drawn eyes and mouth? As I lift and handle it, it continues contracting, shrinking, shriveling. Now it is the size or a tootsie roll, though a little lighter in color. Now the rubbery texture is familiar. In the hands of a stranger working in the dim lighting of a pirate-themed restaurant, this simple rubber tube was inflated and contorted as if by magic into the shape of a monkey to soothe my two-year-old, who had been spooked of the artificial lightning and the skulls skewered on the stalactites of the entrance. It had worked like a charm.
But I hadn’t seen the “I work off tips” button on his striped vest before calling him over. I knew my wallet to be utterly empty and vainly searched my pockets, hoping perhaps that some of the lint or paperclips there had been miraculously transubstantiated into dollar bills or quarters - after all, this guy gave all appearances of being a magician the way he could turn a balloon into a monkey, or a sword, or a birthday crown for my mother-in-law, who was rummaging through her change purse to cover for me.
Shortly thereafter, in the car, the monkey had broken. Only his head – all non-specified monkeys are male, aren’t they? – remained, attached to an elongated trunk, like a snake monkey. Working from the memory of my half-interested examination of the monkey’s construction in the restaurant and the slight indentations along the trunk, I was able to reform the monkey to its previous glory. In part, the “how did he do that?” question had been answered for me, but a lot of the mystery still remained.
Now the magic was over, and I’m left with an empty rubber tube that I mistook for a potty-time accident and then a wriggling creature. But my relief in remembering the innocuous monkey was magic enough.
