Flashbacks to Breakfasts Past. on Cascade Hall

John Umland

July 31, 2015 10:43 AM

Flashbacks to Breakfasts Past. by John Umland

There was, John thought, something he was forgetting, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it might be. Since he had only been awake for about an hour, though, he wasn’t too worried about it. If the feeling persisted after he consumed his breakfast tea, he might have cause for concern, but nothing that happened before the ingestion of his first cup counted toward the day ahead.

Fortunately, the kitchen minions had taken pity on him today. He did not have to go on a lengthy search to find a single decent pot among a wilderness of coffee carafes and containers using similar-looking porcelain to camouflage the fact that their contents were nothing more than lightly caffeinated dishwater - the technical term was ‘green tea,’ but John rejected that quirk of the language. The repurposed dishwater had nothing to do with proper tea and he refused to hear other opinions, including those of history itself, on the matter. From the smell of what was in his cup now, though, he thought he might have actually stumbled across something similar to the mix he drank for breakfast at home, which he thought he remembered reading on the box was made mostly of Assam and Kenyan blacks. Blinking, he looked around at other members of the early breakfast crowd more or less amiably as he stirred in a spoonful of honey, only for his hand to stop moving abruptly when he spotted a pitcher of what looked like grape juice.

"John, are you listening? Pay attention.”

John did not want to pay attention to Paul. He wanted to pay attention to his grape juice box. He liked his juice box. He did not really like it when people asked him stupid questions and demanded that he pay attention. He looked obediently at his older brother, though, because Paul had been in a bad mood and John needed Paul to get the honey nut cereal down from the cabinet for him after he finished his peanut butter toast.

“Remember how I told you about another brother?” asked Paul. John nodded impatiently. Paul and Momma had both talked about that a lot since they had come to this building. He didn’t know as much as Paul, but he wasn’t stupid. He could remember something they had talked about before this morning. “Now you're going to stay with him and - Mom - somewhere while I go to school. Finish your juice and go put your boots on. Remember Left and Right.”

Paul had been teaching John about Left and Right for a while. He got it wrong the first time, but then he got it right and Paul tied the laces for him. Then they walked. And walked. And walked. John covered one ear with his hand, not liking the noise - cars honking, people talking, feet crunching, screens blaring - that was everywhere outside; he tried to get his other hand away from Paul to cover his other ear, but Paul wouldn’t let go of it, so he tried to stuff the collar of his jacket into his ears instead until Paul snapped at him to cut it out and he started to cry and Paul had to lie to a grown-up who said she was worried about them. They had to go into the lobby of another building, which looked a lot different from theirs, to get away from the lady. Yet another grown-up, this one wearing a strange-looking jacket and a stupid hat, looked at them and especially John's boots funny until Paul decided it was okay to leave and, as they started walking again, to start lecturing John about how he’d been very bad and would get them in trouble if he did that again until John decided that everything was going to be awful forever and stopped paying attention to anything but how much his feet hurt with each step and how his arm hurt from Paul pulling him along and how he was mad at anyone on the street who smiled.

Finally, though, they stopped and Paul made him look at him again. “Listen. Now I’m going to teach you something else,” he said, and John sullenly paid a little more attention. “When you get a little bigger, Johnny, sometimes you’ll go out without me.” John shook his head violently – that was The Rule, he was never, ever to leave the flat without Paul – but Paul shook his, too. “When you go to school,” he explained.

“Go with you,” said John.

“No. We’ll be in different classes. But that’s not the point. The point is, when you get bigger, you’ll need to know how to get ‘round adults. You’ve…you’ve always got to be careful around them, John. Invisible, but not - not like what you can do. Just a way of walking so people don't notice you. Because of your – problem.” John looked down, trying to look very serious and sorry because he knew Paul liked it when he could tell John understood that That was Very Bad. Paul, though, wasn't satisfied. “Because what happens if people see you?"

"Bad people come."

"And then what?"

"Never see you and Momma again," recited John.

"That's right. So. Right now, we’re going to follow some grown-ups so we can get in, but they can't notice we're following them, okay? Got it?”

“No.”

Paul looked impatient. “Okay. Just...be quiet and... try to be invisible and watch what I do.”

Paul started walking the way he did in shops, staying just a little way behind two grown-ups they didn’t know. John nearly froze, though, when they left the long hallway and walked into a huge open room, all glass doors on one side, which seemed to stretch up as tall as their whole building and to open up to the sky at the far-away top. The room made him dizzy and he didn’t want to go into it. He was afraid he'd disappear. Paul pulled on his hand hard, though, and he followed, biting his thumbnail as the sounds of Paul’s footsteps echoed, along with the ringing of telephones and steps of other people and strange beeps from places he couldn’t see.

“Paul? Um, I, I don’t like it here,” he whispered to Paul. Paul ignored him.

More walking. Eventually, the grown-ups went away and they had to wait until Paul picked out a new grown-up to shadow. Then, finally, Paul opened a door and shoved John through it. John looked around, terrified by huge flat lights on the ceiling and strange angles of everything around him, but then –

“Mommy!” he exclaimed, happier to see her than he had ever been to see anything in his whole life. She had been around all the time, except when she went to work at the mini-mart, for a long time, then she had left…more than one nap ago and he had worried she had been taken away forever because he had done something bad, something Paul said he was never ever supposed to do, even though he hadn’t been able to figure out what it was he’d done. She was holding what looked like a pile of blankets for some reason, but John paid little attention to it as he wrapped his hands around her elbow and pressed his face against her arm. Then the bundle of blankets moved, something hit the top of his head, and he jumped back, alarmed. It was then that he noticed the bundle had a hand and, more importantly, a face, a small, grumpy-looking red one on a head which was too big for the rest of its self. Its mouth was a thin, lopsided line and its eyes looked all black.

“What do you think of your new brother?” asked Momma as John looked distrustfully at the thing she was holding.

John considered his response. “It looks like an alien,” he announced finally.

Eleven years later, he blinked and muttered under his breath as he removed the teaspoon from his cup. He remembered what he’d forgotten now. He also realized he had probably been over-intent in his study of the juice pitcher as it reminded him of what he'd been trying to remember. Specifically, that it was his younger brother’s birthday.

Not that he needed to do anything. He and Julian had already written home to congratulate Joe on his continued existence – it was always best to do so early when they were writing home for specific reasons, just to make sure the weather or the border didn't delay the post. It was just that he felt like it was something he should have remembered a little more easily, lack of tea before now or none. Days just flowed together too easily when usually, all he really needed to know was that it was Wednesday and whether it was Wednesday the Seventh or Wednesday the Fourteenth really didn’t affect his day-to-day life in any meaningful way.

He pinched the bridge of his nose and took a swallow of his tea. It was never quite as good as it was at home, he thought – it was rougher, somehow more bitter and less flavorful at the same time. If his grandma, and to a lesser extent his dad, were anything to go by, it was an American thing. There were things he would concede the Americans did reasonably well, but they just did not seem to get tea quite right and some seemed almost proud of that fact. His grandma, at least, found the habit of consuming tea without ice bizarre and had explicitly called it un-American once, though the context in which she’d said it (a political discussion of places where magical Canada’s interests conflicted with non-magical America’s) made him think she might have just been teasing his mother. Mom had no reason to particularly care if the Cousins approved of her Library Blend, at least not until the day American politicians became weird enough to invade over a housewife’s taste in hot stimulants, which didn't seem likely if only because of how there had to be intermediate levels of weirdness that ended in nuclear war long before they reached the point of going to war over his mother’s drink orders.

He drained his teacup, nearly choking on the last sip because of the rush of not-quite-dissolved honey at the bottom of it. This provided an excellent distraction from the inside of his head, so he poured himself another cup and added a little too much sweetener to it, too. Then he got a piece of toast and smeared some peanut butter on it. Happy birthday, space creature, he thought, raising the toast slightly in a mock-toast to Joe before beginning to eat it.

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