Toddler Pulp

“I said hold on!” Jackie said louder than she needed to.

Below her, little Nicko continued to wail, holding his arms above his head. Bright tears rolled down his cheeks like beads of morning dew.

“Ma! Op!” he pleaded.

“Just a second, little man,” Jackie tried to sooth. “I’m almost done.”

She looked back to the cookbook on the counter; what was supposed to be a forty minute recipe had stretched into an hour and a half. The kitchen turned into a wasteland of eggshells and discarded paper towels. Now that Jackie was more than halfway through the preparation, the recipe became more complicated, and Nicko needed more attention. She stood as a woman split between a want and a need; she just didn’t know which was which.

One glance around her workspace was all it took. She’d come this far, by God, her son could cry for just another moment.

“Op! Ma!”

Jackie ran a floured finger down her temple. The yelling was going on thirty minutes now; nothing pacified him. Not the TV, not the tablet, not the usual no-no toys like dad’s watch or the remote. He didn’t even want any food; he kept his arms up high as the universal call sign for pick me up, dammit!

“I’ll pick you up, I promise,” she said.

And then it caught her eye; at least the reflection did. She looked past Nicko, through the sliding glass door and into the backyard. A humble square patch of fuzzy green grass; he couldn’t be out there for long, especially not alone, but it might do the trick. It’d even give Jackie an opportunity to open the oven and slide the cake in without jeopardizing the little one. He had a knack for trying to crawl into anything with a door.

“Hey, buddy, Mom’s got an idea,” she said, sidestepping the toddler and leading him in the other direction. “You get a free pass!”

She slid the door open and let in a wave of fresh air. It pulled at both of their senses, crisp and clean, begging them to go out. Nicko blinked away his tears, swallowed his last cry, and waddled to the open portal. The redness of his face surrendered to a cheesy grin as he passed through the threshold.

Jackie bolted to the counter and got to work; she cleaned the edge of the pan with a towel, set the timer, and slid the cake in as delicately as she could. There was a wet towel by the sink she used to wipe up the excess sugar and vanilla extract.

A quick glance over her shoulder let her know that Nicko was still upright, jetting from one side of the yard to the other. He hadn’t made it to the rocks by the fence yet, which he’d put in his mouth and try to break his teeth on.

“Damn, what is that? Smells incredible!” Don said from down the hall. She hadn’t heard him come through the front door.

“I made the cake. It’s been a nightmare,” Jackie explained as she emptied her dirty towel into the trash can. “The recipe ran long and Nicko didn’t like that.”

“Seems fine now,” Don said.

“He stopped crying ten seconds before you walked in,”

Don moved in to kiss her. They leaned on the sticky counter.

“How long for the cake?”

“I just put it in,” Jackie said between kisses.

“Where’s Nicky?”

Jackie pulled away from Don so quickly she almost gave herself whiplash. The kid had been holding silence hostage for so long that she really started to relish it. It was the only thing she wanted for half an hour, short of the cake fiasco to be over with. Now that she had half a minute of it, she forgot about the rest of the world.

“Shit,” she yelped. “NICKO!”

“What--” Don started to ask, but he could see it. His son’s single outstretched finger cutting through the air. The unsteady nature of his stance, little feet struggling to find purchase in the jagged stones. Jackie ran like lightning through the door, but seemed to be moving in slow motion at the same time. Nothing in the world could be fast enough to stop it.

It wasn’t the rocks, nor the finger moving outward; it was what waited at the end. The knothole in the board, wide as a quarter--the same one Don meant to patch last week.

Frothing, gnashing teeth waited just beyond the plank. The Kilman’s kept a ferocious mutt that was notoriously unfriendly. Many birds and neighborhood cats turned up dead over the years, and the quiet suspicion was the dog.

Nicko’s finger would be comparable to a boiled carrot once it entered its mouth; a brief crunch, and then a soft, mushy finish. Toddler pulp. Don could already hear his son’s inconsolable wails; the same ones Jackie dealt with earlier, he mused.

But then she was there, swooping the boy up under his armpits just as the tip of his finger met the bubbles of spit oozing through the boards. She swung him around to one hip like a truly practiced mother, muttering all manner of indiscernible prayers.

It took Don four or five steps to realize he was in motion, stumbling on carpet and then spongy bermuda grass. Trembling hands came up before him--hands he wasn’t sure were his own--to inspect his son’s precious little bits.

“Is it okay?” someone asked in Don’s voice. “Is he hurt?”

“He’s fine,” Jackie said. “Just in time.”

Don took shaky breaths as he came back into his skin.

“That was close,” his wife reflected.

“How long was he out here?”

“Only a minute,” Jackie whispered.