Precocity

This was written for the sake of writing. Like riding your bike through downtown for no other reason just to do it. In other words: practice for something bigger someday, maybe.

Precocity
Shavings from the organic carrot Alex grabbed from the crisper and was shaping into a figurine floated down from the Fifth Street Apartments like snowflakes into the summer Chicago traffic. His feet dangled like crepe paper attached to the ceiling by flimsy strips of scotched tape. The six year old had his tools meticulously laid out next to him: toothpicks for precise features, a dulled butter knife for more global choppings, and an Exacto knife which held a blunt blade for the tasks in between. He wasn’t sure what he was etching into this carrot, but he knew it was inexplicably important. The was a huge pile of orange failed attempts sitting next to him, showing that he knew precisely what he did not want this to end up as. His mother’s late-eighties Madonna music seeped up onto the roof and when he listened carefully, he overheard his mother’s tenor reinterpretation of “Like a Virgin.”
Alex laughed and quoted his father when his Mom attempted the chorus: “Sure you are.” It was a quip that he had worked into his local vocabulary over the past few months and he enjoyed the reactions he earned from teachers and peers when he employed this phrase. For example, during a recent spelling test his instructor made the declaration “I am a professional.” Alex’s instinctive response of “Sure you are’ landed him to be the first kindergartener to have a week’s worth of detentions which also incorporated the latest school policy of forbidding any excessive sugar (i.e. Little Debbie individually wrapped snacks) from being consumed during the course of the school day. This was precisely why Alex began carving his vegetables. At first he used the imprecise tines of sporks and ends of spoons to whittle away at the food, but he had now investigated the various venues of carving instruments.
He picked up the Exacto knife and began to shape a flamboyant orange jaw-line.
This was the biggest carrot the stocked refrigerator held. He had requested of his mom to buy only organic a few weeks ago, claiming that his teacher had taught them that typical produce had been genetically modified. He did not know what this meant exactly, but he assumed that “genetics” was a typical push-button word between his mother and father, it would cause her to make precise and immediate action. It did. The vegetables in which his mom now brought back from the Frank’s Fresh Produce was now bigger (although it tasted worse).
As Alex scooped out enough carrot excess to have the vegetable resemble sunken cheeks, a nursery rhyme chimed from deep within his nylon short’s pockets. “Row, row, row your boat.” He sighed, put the carrot and his utensils down, and brought out his dated cellphone.
“Mmmyellow?”
He blinked slowly as he processed the voice on the other line.
“I see.” Nods, verbal nods, and finally he pressed the end button on his phone.
He looked at the carrot etching he had been working on and put it into a olive felt case. The bodies of aborted carrots he looked at, took a bite from each, and then pushed them off the apartment building.
His mother who had just finished a rather successful chorus in “Like a Virgin” must have recently Windexed the windows and he heard a shrill “Alex” rub through the roof. Alex pocketed the felt pouch and left the roof.

Alex sits across the diplomatically from his friend Charlie. He shuffles in his pocket and produces the semi-carved carrot.
“It’s getting better.”
“I still don’t see the point.”
“Neither do I, but it has to be done. Like my mom singing ‘Like a Virgin.’ I don’t think that has a purpose, but it needs to be done.”
Charlie, stout and most accurately described as round, dismounts the tall stool and waddles into the adjacent pickled-wallpaper room. Alex hears closing and clanging of cabinets until Charlie returns with a Crown Royal bag and hops back to his seat. He loosens the strings and unveils a bottle of Scope which holds a neon brown liquid inside.
“What is this?” Alex asks.
“I have no idea.”
Alex takes the bottle, unscrew it, whiffs the contents and looks confusedly.
“It smells like movie theatre popcorn with lots of butter.”
“It does.”
“Why?”
“Why are you carving indistinguishable famous figures into carrots?”
“Detention does strange things to a boy.”
The two look at each other. Alex takes a swig from the Scope and coughs a little.
“Tastes like burning. Am I going to die?”
Charlie giggles a bit.
“No. It’s all stuff from the food cabinets.”
Almost businesslike, Alex’s phone vibrates. He takes it out and skims a text message informing him dinner is ready.”
“Gotta go. Maybe we’ll figure this out soon. Have you been watching those Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reruns that are real old I gave you?”
Charlie sparks up for the first time. “Yeah! My old cousin – he’s like twenty or forty – he says he’s going to try to find his action figures and give them to me.”
“Awesome.”
Alex walks home whistling “Like a Virgin.”

The dinner table is set and his mom and dad wait patiently as they sit directly across from one another. Alex hops up onto a stool and starts washing his hands as he overhears his parents’ conversation.
“If you read the paper daily,” Alex’s frustrated father spouts, “maybe you might develop more intelligent views.”
Alex’s mother takes the defensive. “You just hate America.”
With wet hands, Alex pulls out his chair. He closes his eyes and performs a quick “mental meditation maintenance” as his father describes it. When he opens his eyelids, his father beams and mother looks disgusted.
“Alex, don’t you want to say prayers with words instead of your father’s techniques? Don’t you want to be religious like me?”
“Sure you are.” Alex’s unaware biting tongue retorts.
The dinner lulls as Alex tries explaining what he spent his entire day doing: carving carrots. Neither of the parents understand the obsession. His father fiddles with the buttons on the cuff of his shirt and his mother drinks water from an empty glass. If this is just a phase, then it will pass.

Recess. The middle of a freeze tag match where Alex is subjected to balancing himself on one foot in high turret where no child will dare risk freedom in an attempt to unfreeze
Alex. He is out of the game, essentially. He pulls out a nearly completed carrot figurine from his felt bag and uses his thumb fingernail to etch in a few more details. All his fingernails are ostentatiously long as a result from this new obsession so he can work on his project in school and not risk expulsion from owning an Exacto knife. Unaware of his surroundings, a classmate tags and frees a startled Alex who juggles briefly with his figurine before dropping it on the ground. He hurdles over the playground equipment and sloppily gets tagged again, but disregards the consequences. Just as he is about to pick up the carved carrot, an older instructor beats him to the opportunity. She looks confused then bedazzled by the object.
“Is this yours?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going to the principal’s office.”

The principal’s office is quiet. Charlie dangles his feet from the chair he sits in. Alex takes a seat next to him.
“You finished too?” Alex asks.
“Yup.”
“Was yours offensive?”
“No. But they claim it was.”
“Weird.”
The playground attendant comes in a few seconds later. She looks at Alex and Charlie then grunts and places the figurine next to Charlie’s vial of brown substance.

Twenty minutes later in the principal’s office, a bald man fills out the documentation explaining why Alex cannot attend school for the next few days. The principal sighs.
“Why did you make this figurine?” he asks, almost pleadingly.
“I don’t know. Because.”
“Do your parents dislike this man?” the principal asks, gesturing to the figurine which looks like a cross between Bush and an incredibly urbane ape.
“One does, the other doesn’t.”
“Explain why you took off his limbs again.”
Annoyed, Alex begins his recited response. “I didn’t deliberately rip them off. They came off when it was dropped from the top of the playground.”
The principal sighs again.
“We can’t have kindergarteners making grandiose political statements like this. You with this effigy. Charlie has a liquid that smells worse than a stink bomb. Do you know what he calls it?”
“No.”
“Karl Rove’s scent after being freshly showered.”
Alex moves from one side of the chair to the other.
“I still don’t think I did anything wrong. My dad reads the New York Times to me each night for bedtime stories.”
“Disgusting.”
“It’s better than most books. The pictures have lots of detail. Doesn’t our president look like a monkey? C’mon, just a little bit.”
“Your parents are coming to pick you up.”
“Well, Mister, what do you think we should do with the Gaza strip?”
The principal turns bright red. Alex’s vocabulary exceeds precociousness. The principal responds to this question with an unrelated question. “What do you think of ‘Where the Wild Things Roam?’”
Alex looks up to the left and examines the pinpoint decorations on the ceiling tiles.
“Haven’t heard of that one. Let’s keep talking politics. I’m more comfortable with it.”
Alex’s shorts start vibrating. Before he gets a chance to silence the phone, he finds the principal’s ape hand patiently awaiting the cell phone. Hesitantly, Alex places it into his gargantuan hands.
The principal scrolls through the recently received message. It reads:
“From: Dad
Message: Good one son. ;) .”