September 15, 2020

feeding the sea-monkeys

Among their list of weekly household chores, the neighbor girls have added
”feeding the sea-monkeys.” Their friends, returning to their home states, have left 
these charges behind, and the girls—freshly responsible for a pair of actual living things—
are earnest as they explain the granular details of the creatures’ special diet, 
the terrible smell the tiny pellets give off as they are slipped one by one into the tank. 
I missed the boat on certain childhoods—ballet recitals with a starring role, parties 
at the skating rink, slippery midnight escapes down ivy-covered brick stone—but now,
the girls have delivered a new one, wrapped in briny ribbon and stinking of fish, 
and I find myself bewitched by a world accessible only through glass as told through
the eyes of two girls who are tending its indefensible residents like mothers.