A Usual Wednesday Night

Mother had made a breakfast meal this evening. Eggs scrambled sprinkled with small pieces of pepper: black. The pancakes were round, well, as close as could be, some had straight edges but they were large, larger than usual, greater than the plates edge. Mother always made a couple small cakes for me and would say, "They are small boy, eat them quickly before your father gets home, it is Wednesday." Then she would reach into the icebox and grab the bottle of milk. I always enjoyed drinking the cold milk from the glass bottle. Mother would let me once it was near finished. I would wait for the rooms heat to hit the bottle and once the waterdrops started to form I would use the glass as a canvas, drawing circles, and letters, and one time a lion with the tip of my fingers. "Enough boy!" she would say loudly, "He will be here soon." Soon would come and he would as well, crooked through the door, drunk again. I never wanted to leave her there alone but I was always directed to. I just went and laid underneath my covers and thought about that lizard I had caught last week, and waited for the maddened shouts. It was not much of a struggle to capture the lizard, seeing as how my only friend Billy had thrown his shoe, and knocked it off of the treee it was perched on. He did not kill it, that took only the next 6 days to accomplish, we pulled some grass from Billy's backyard and stuffed it with the lizard into one of Billy's mothers shoe boxes, not the large boxes, the small ones with tiny white shoes on the side. I placed the small oddly shaped rock into the box for companionship, and we put small worms, and a yellow looking snail, and a brown spider, 3 small pieces of dried bread, and a small sliver of a pickle. As I cracked the lid to peek on our capture, the lizard sat there so beautiful. Hued with blacks and browns, some green and some blue, and speckled with small spots of yellow. It sat half covered in that box by clutter but it had a certain look of eneasiness in its smile. A look much like the one I see on my mothers face, Thursday mornings, and as I awoke that Thursday morning, Father was already gone to the factory and Mother was knelt down scraping dried pieces of eggs sprinkled with black from off the kitchen walls. "Watch your step," she said to me. A glass plate broken on the floor, and I needed not ask what happened. She had that lizard type smile formed by her mouth and said in the most calming voice, " The milk bottle is about empty again, would you like to draw something?"