Tasting colors

playing with narrating a kids perspective... random but imaginative..

My dad says that I have superpowers. I am not sure what he means. He tells me that I am special because I can see and interact with the world in a special way. I am not convinced that it's a superpower. I am not very good at communicating what's in my head. The hardest thing is that I see my world in colors.

If the taste of her cooking had a color it'd be yellow. Like the petals of sunflowers… it wouldn’t taste like sunflowers.. just feel like sunflowers. Mom says that it doesn't make sense to taste a feeling or the color yellow either. I try and put things in a way she might understand and tell her about the different colored ketchup's… how the green one despite tasting like ketchup… reminded me of the way that snot feels in your mouth when you pick your nose and eat it. The purple ketchup felt like eating a cartoon. The orange one felt like it should taste like carrots or mashed sweet potatoes but didn't.

  My father's cooking was the color red… like the color of a stop light before you run it. It tasted rushed… and not like ketchup. I would sometimes feed Tinker our Pomeranian the scraps… but only from the food that tasted red. Tinker seemed to enjoy it well enough and dad didn't seem to notice how the food would disappear from my plate. I was practicing to be a wizard you see. I was at least a 2nd rate wizard by now. Sometimes in the mornings I would try to weave my magic spells while mom and dad got ready for work. I would use "slight of hand" to take the keys from my dads pocket and move them somewhere else. The Magic books my mom got me seemed to be convinced that this was a most useful spell. To me it seemed less like magic and more like trickery; However when dad didn't see me take them I figured my magic was working because he was convinced that they had "disappeared". 

Today I was on my way to get a haircut. Something that my mom said was overdue. I spent all day imagining the space in between the scissor blades… How they would chomp down on my hair follicles severing hundreds at a time. I wondered if I would still be the same person afterward. After all I would be losing a part of myself or myself would be losing a part of me and the hair follicles on the floor would somehow still be me. Do they somehow cease to be me at the precise moment the scissors do their dirty work? This is something I ask my mother promptly as now I am fearing that I will lose something. She goes on reassuring me that it “will all be ok”.... But as the scissors cut I feel a tingly sense of loss in the pit of my stomach. Something about me has changed and I can’t tell if I am better off this way.

I heard on the radio that cat urine can train mice to forget that they hate cats. I think it's only certain cats and I am not sure how it works… but maybe it has to do with the color yellow. Yellow is a powerful color. It's the color of the sun and my dad says that the sun is very important and makes it so we can see during the day. Which I don’t fully understand… because the sun isn’t always around… and flashlights and streetlamps seem to do an ok job. Maybe the sun is covered with street lamps that have to recharge. I wonder who is in charge of the sun and if he has to replace the lightbulbs. Anyway, cat urine must be a pretty important thing if it can go around training mice not to hate cats all day. I wonder if it can train people to forget how to hate other people.

My Nana Mary says that people in turbans are bad. Which I am not sure is true… a man in a turban smiled at me once. He was tall and owned the convenience store on the corner of broadway and maine. He gave me one of those white and red peppermint candies on my way out the door. He reminded me of the color blue; kinda like the ocean… how you can’t see it past the horizon but there is more too it than you can actually see. My mom says that if you get on a boat and keep going you would end up in other countries. Places where things weren’t how they are here. Also the man smelled salty like he sweated a lot. I wonder if he is always there at the convenient store.

I’ve never understood the phrase “Can’t hold a candle to” my Aunt used it once to describe how she was a better runner than my dad; but in my mind candles had nothing to do with it. Maybe she means that if my dad chased her holding a candle he could not tag her with it. Still wouldn’t the flame go out before he could reach her? I don’t know about holding a candle but my aunt runs marathons and I doubt my dad could catch her if he tried. So I guess my dad can’t hold a candle to my aunt martha. I mean if I saw my dad holding a lit candle and started towards me I would run too; but maybe my dad could “hold a candle to” me though it might hurt.