Category: The Cereal Bowl Series

Cereal No. 5

when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
    and the flame shall not consume you. (Isaiah 43:2b ESV)

Fascination

The red flashing lights washed over the walls of her empty bedroom. The fire department had squelched the fire in the woods behind her house. Her parents were worried sick. And she was hunting for a train.

After her parents had fallen asleep, she crept out the back door. She wore her father’s wool army jacket with the canteen slung over one shoulder, and the knapsack over the other. The fifty-six dollars she borrowed from her mother’s tin can, she secured in a zippered pocket inside the jacket.

Her next stop before the railroad tracks was the shed, where her father kept the lawnmower. She jimmied open the latch, and quietly stole inside to take the gasoline can with her. A box of matches from the pantry were in her jeans pocket. She closed the shed door, and started towards the woods.

Once at the fort, she set aside her travel gear and started pouring gasoline around the perimeter. She stepped inside searching the dark night air with all her senses. A fiery memory singed her throat. She took a breath, and doused the bench seat with the remaining fuel. She ran back outside gagging from the fumes. She threw the can into the underbrush. She struck a match and whoosh the fire engulfed the fort in minutes.

Running with her gear slung over her shoulders, with the night vision of a cat, she made her way to the path that led to the train. To the train that would take her to the city. Her bulging belly slowed her down, and the crackling sound of the brush catching fire behind her tempted her to stop. But she kept going. No looking back now.

At the railroad tracks, she thought she heard the faint sound of an approaching train. Just a whistle in the wind or was that the train retreating? She sat on the damp grass beside the tracks to catch her breath. She waited. And waited, but no train.

She heard the sirens of the fire trucks, she almost looked back to see the woods aflame. Instead she hefted herself up from the ground. Looked to the west. Looked the east. Not even a hint of a train.

She knew the tracks would lead her towards her destination. She stepped over the rail and started walking east, stepping from railroad tie to railroad tie. Smoke filled her nostrils with a strange desire, a fascination with her own power. A new found ability to erase the past propelled her forward. A flutter in her belly reminded her that a new life dwelt within her.

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Cereal No. 4

For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it— (Luke 14:28 NKJV)

Calculation

The mother noticed that her girl was gaining weight despite her birdlike eating habits. She also noticed that the box of saltines was missing from the pantry. She kept close account of her pantry. The evidence was adding up, but the mother didn’t want to believe the possible answer.

Should she confront her daughter, then she would have to disclose her knowledge to her husband. Maybe if she just waited, things would work themselves out. But, to be sure, something was amiss.

The girl was working out some of her own calculations. If she told her mother about her condition, then her father would be included in the discussion. If you could call it a discussion; he still regarded her as a nuisance to be avoided. The only time he paid any attention to her was when he was good and drunk.

Then he would get semi-interested. He would come into her room and watch her sleeping. She knew this because she wasn’t really sleeping; just pretending. She would hear him sigh, and sometimes she thought she heard him quietly sobbing. But that couldn’t be true, he could care less about her. Or so she thought.

Anyways, she couldn’t tell her mother. She would try to talk her out of keeping the baby. And she really didn’t believe her father would care one way or the other. She had a better plan. She would escape.

The railroad was south of their property. As kids, she and the neighbor boy, used to hike down through the woods and across the county line to flatten pennies on the track. They would carefully place a few pennies on the rail, and then wait. And wait. The train never did come while they were waiting.

They would get bored, and then go play hide and seek in the woods. The next day, they would hike back and the pennies were gone. They speculated that the pennies were stolen by Indians or the train was so fast that the pennies stuck to the wheels instead of the track. Either way, their penny flattening adventures were always a bust. But this time her adventure was going to be grand, she just knew it.

With a baby on the way, and a train to hop, she was going to the city. She would pack her knapsack with saltines and fill the old army canteen with water. Her mother kept some cash in an old tin can in the back of the pantry. She would just borrow it, and then someday pay her mother back.

She had heard of hobos traveling across the country to get work. Maybe some nice hobo would help her find her way. She figured she’d go east towards the Big Apple. If she couldn’t make it that far, there had to be a lesser city where she could start her new life.

She had a plan. She would leave Saturday night, after her parents returned from the tavern, and when the train most likely would be going through the woods.

But before she left, she had one more thing to do.

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Cereal No. 2

He determines the number of the stars;
    he gives to all of them their names. (Psalm 147:4 ESV)

Multiplication

Truth be told she had more babies than she could count. As many as the stars in the sky, as they say. Or was it grains of sand on the shore? She could never remember which metaphor was more apt. But either way she had a lot of babies. And the babies had more fathers than she cared to recall.

She had a father once. But he was never the daddy she wanted. She wanted a daddy, who would carry her on his shoulders. A daddy who kissed her mommy ever day after work. A daddy who would give her a baby sister or baby brother. But no, she was his one and only child. A child he hardly knew existed. She could be a stray cat for all he knew. A little kitten mewing for attention, which he ignored or on a really good night kicked to her bedroom because he couldn’t stand her. Or so she thought.

Her mother was a stout woman, who scrubbed their wooden floors on her knees every Saturday morning, pulling out the chairs from the kitchen and corralling them with the couch and end tables. She would push all the furniture from one side of the room to the other to do the floors in sections. She never did clean under the TV console, too heavy to move.

The house was a two bedroom cottage with an eat-in kitchen, a living room and a full bath with an old claw-footed tub. Out back on a small enclosed porch was the mother’s prized possession, an electric wringer washer. Clothes were dried on the collapsible drying lines on a pole in the backyard. Summer or winter, didn’t matter, her mother hung the clothes outside. Her mother was quite proud of her washing machine. It was the only automated machine in the house besides the console TV, and the kitchen appliances, of course.

The little girl liked Saturdays. It was a day that she imagined the chairs were a long train taking her far into the countryside. She ignored the living room furniture, those pieces weren’t going anywhere except back and forth across the cramped living space. Her mother’s chess pieces that she moved about the room each Saturday. Never once did her mother rearrange the furniture, when she was done cleaning. Back each piece would go to its resting place on her chess board floor.

The little girl would gather her doll baby into her arms, and climb aboard the train. “All Aboard!” she would call quietly to herself and the baby. She would hold the baby close cooing to her with endearing words: “Your momma’s little tweety bird, aren’t you?” “Such a sweetie pie.” “You are the cutest little bug, a momma could want.” “Dontcha ever forget who you are my plum pudding girl.” “Your momma won’t ever forget you; no she won’t, no she won’t.” And the girl would giggle and the doll would stare blankly at her. But the girl didn’t care, they were going to see the world. She was going to leave the little country cottage and live in a big city.

On Saturday nights, her mother and father went out. The neighbor lady came over and snored on the couch while the TV played reruns of “I Love Lucy.” The girl crept out the back door with her doll baby in tow, she’d lie down under the empty clothes line and stare at the stars. “Too many to count,” she whispered to her baby. “One day I’m going to have more babies than the stars,” she declared to the attentive night sky.

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