Saturdays
They shout at each other using the “potty words” that their mom has banned; they bounce off the table and land in their laps. Their dad doesn’t notice, and their mom is asleep so they string long clusters of them together, throats closing in laughter before they can finish. The donuts on their plates sit half-eaten, the soft dough squashed by their fingers, crusted sugar falling across their plates. One of them chews at the ends of his hair, leaving sticky spikes clinging to his head. The other one licks the frosting off of each donut until his tongue turns red, then blue, then, the dark purple of a bruise.
Sugar races through their blood making their arms and legs bounce with energy and the desire to bash and smash things. They press their stinky hands into their monster trucks and crash their wheels into their plates until they flip, sending donuts skittering across the table, and falling onto the floor where the dog snaps them quickly between his teeth, swallowing as many pieces as he can before one of the boys reaches down to shoo him away and rescue (what’s left) of their donuts.
They finish eating and race each other to the couch, flinging off every pillow and cushion and stomping across the hard springs underneath that feel like rocks against their bare feet. They stomp and pound across the bones of the couch, their voices rising to drown out the movie playing on the TV. When their favorite part comes on, they rush to play their parts in tandem with the movie. They spill their toy bins across the living room rug until a sea of toys (and half-broken crayons and popsicle sticks and plastic cups that long ago went missing) floods the floor. They shape the mass into mountains, placing themselves at the peaks along with their favorite trucks. They mimic the voices that they hear on the TV, the same phrases echoed in their mouths, the feeling of despair written across their faces turning to whoops of celebration as the characters come through.
They can remember (or almost remember) when Saturday morning used to mean the four of them around the table, donuts piled at the center, their mom smiling at something their dad said or maybe holding his hand, their dad pecking their mom on the cheek or the lips before he left. Now, it means Toy Story, donuts (only for them), their dad sitting in his chair with his phone pressed to his face, the hush of the sound machine in their parent’s bedroom only stopping once their dad has left, their mom’s tight smile as she finally comes out of the bedroom.
They don’t realize that their dad has left until the movie ends and there’s no one there to turn it off. They call his name and run to the door, hands crashing against the wood to stop the momentum of their bodies. They see only their mom’s car in the driveway. One of them sighs, and the other one catches himself before he asks why he didn’t tell them goodbye; a question he doesn’t want the answer to. They can still hear the sound machine from their parent’s bedroom. They return to the living room, dumping the toys back into their bins and dragging them, slowly, back into the playroom before their mom wakes up.
