Chapter 156: Even Newer Lows

I want to say it was that Thursday. It might not have been. It might have been the same day that I thwarted Sosa and Winters’s normalization scheme. (Note: It’s not important whether they followed through on their plan, or if all of us got changed on the floor regardless of our protests. The point is their chicanery was dispelled and called out.)

It might have been Friday. It might have been the next week or the week after for all I know. It’s not like something noteworthy or interesting happened every day of the week. But for the purposes of narrative, let’s say it first happened that next Thursday afternoon.

I was on the couch, in nothing but a t-shirt and diaper, busily clunking away on my tablet, adding more and more to my memoirs from before my Adoption. Janet had changed me as soon as we got home and yanked off my sweatpants, shoes, and socks in her haste. My sweatshirt with the farm animals on it was stripped off me as well; otherwise I would have looked ridiculous. My brow was creased in concentration and my eyes unfocused as I relived those anxiety filled days that seemed so recent while also feeling incredibly distant.

I was going to have to make peace with Amy and apologize to her.

She was going to forgive me. I had zero doubt on that front. It didn’t make it any less embarrassing for me to cook and eat that humble pie. I paused mid thought: Maybe if I wrote out mine and Amy’s first couple of meetings I could properly explain why I’d reacted like I had. But no; that would take too long to do it well, and I don’t think such a showing would mean as much to her as it did to Janet. This was something I couldn’t just write myself out of.

I slid off the couch and grabbed the T.V. remote. I flipped over to my favorite station. A re-run of the Muffet Show would serve as good background noise while I collected my thoughts, and it would function as a timer of sorts. I’d have one, maybe two episodes to watch before Janet inevitably kicked into high gear and redressed me so that we could go to Little Voices.

Where I’d inevitably have to apologize to Amy…

I looked back up to the couch while the opening theme song rolled. I could have jumped back up onto the couch, but I opted instead to tip toe and take my tablet down onto the floor with me. The playmat was just as comfortable if not more so than the couch and it was less likely Janet would be looking over my shoulder or bothering me if I presented as more of a ‘proper Little’ to her. Just by moving over to the play mat to record my most personal memories I was being more infantile in her eyes.

I let out a contented sigh as I stepped back onto the magic foam-like surface. I sat down and moaned to myself just under my breath. I pulled the tablet into my naked lap. I’d start writing as soon as I recognized which episode it was.

It was my favorite. Of course it was. This episode guest starred Princeton Vance in all of his goofy and spooky delight. For those not in the know, Princeton Vance was a black and white horror movie actor; and he was almost always the evil vampire or the mad scientist. So his turn with the Muffets had them really hamming it up and blending horror and humor. The guy seemed to be having fun himself; not taking anything too seriously, and the puppeteers and designers must have had a blast getting to break out their creepiest creations.

Come to think of it, I’d never seen a Princeton Vance movie. I only knew him by his reputation as a guest star or recurring role on various children’s media. I’d never watched the master of schlocky horror at his peak, only the caricature of himself that he played later in life.

Why was this my favorite episode? Or more to the point, what did this being my favorite say about me? The hundred or so episodes forever looping around and around on reruns were filled to the brim with actors, musicians, comedians, and various other celebrities, all at different points in their career and cultural relevance. They had singers, athletes, and award winning actors galore. The guest stars were always booked to pull in the adults while the puppets supposedly distracted the children.

So why was it that I always gravitated towards this one particular episode? This guy making a mockery of his own career and acting more like a child’s birthday clown than the most intimidating man on the silver screen? The Muffet Show was a stage where serious folk had fun putting on clown makeup and comedians got a chance to lure in a new generation of fans. But Princeton Vance sort of made a transition by cannonballing into the kiddie pool head first. He’d gone from a horror actor to a funny old man who pretended to be a horror actor.

Why did I suddenly relate to that? The kid thing pretending to be an adult thing?

I laughed my ass off anyways when the Little Muffets (not to be confused with Muffet Littles) all sprouted fangs and jumped the guy. Maybe that’s why I liked this episode. It’s rare to see an Amazon willing to be the butt of the joke regarding Littles, even if said Littles were made of felt.

“Bottle?” Janet offered. She was looming over me, a tall glass of milk with a rubber nipple on top waiting in her hand.

I looked up at her and then down to myself. My tablet was no longer in my lap; I’d brushed it off to the side. Evidently I didn’t have the focus in me to properly reflect and narrate my fractured existence. My diaper was wet, though I couldn’t remember when that had happened, exactly. The words weren’t flowing, but something else certainly had been. I suppose I’d been too engrossed by the program to keep track and too relaxed to do anything but let go. Oh well. I’d get changed when Mommy redressed me.

“Yes please!” I chirped. I took the bottle greedily and laid back down on a couch pillow I don’t remember bringing with me. Just like I’d hoped, it was chilled ‘goat’ milk. Mommy’s milk helped calm the butterflies in my stomach fluttering about over apologizing to Amy. A few hefty gulps and my breathing was starting to slow and my eyes were getting more and more unfocused. It was like I was being cuddled from the inside out.

Oh yeah. That was the good stuff.

Mommy chuckled good naturedly. “I’ll come and get you when it’s time,” she promised and resumed folding laundry or whatever it was Grown-Ups did when we weren’t watching.

I kept watching the show, drinking my creamy milk, wiggling my toes while puppets performed old vaudeville style acts with psychedelic twists on the screen in front of me. This was perfect. Just perfect.

Perfection never lasts, though. There’s always something to throw off the equilibrium. In my case it was the slight feeling of fullness making itself known. Lunch was digested and it did not care to wait for dinner or breakfast to make its exit.

Lying on the playmat is the nearest I’d been to flying. Every cell and muscle and bit of weight was perfectly compensated so that the person felt practically weightless. The mat however had no cure for the most mild intestinal cramps.

It did, however, rebalance itself while I lifted my legs up off the floor and bent my knees closer to my belly. I was practically hovering when my elbows bent into my armpits and my tongue plugged up the hole in my bottle so that I could better focus and push. I barely felt the diaper expand at all because as soon as the brown sticky loaf was outside of me, the mat compensated for the additional mass as it were.

The solid, slightly moist muck, spread out into a finer paste when I lowered my legs back down. The bottom of my balls was lightly caked with the stuff and it felt like warm play doh had materialized between my ass cheeks.

Did I call out for a change? Or find a clever way to cause my Mommy some bit of grief or make a point about my condition? I did not. That would have interrupted the show. So would have finding a convenient corner to soil myself in.

I didn’t want to agonize over the logistics of my pride and self-respect yet again. I just wanted to relax and enjoy my show and feel all warm and fuzzy with Mommy’s milk. I finished my bottle and laid it to the side right as Princeton Vance was doing his closing number; a rendition of ‘Put On A Happy Face’ by way of a disfigured mask wearing maniac. Classic stuff.

I let out a sigh and closed my eyes. “I’ll just…rest…my…” I didn’t make it to the end of the sentence before I was snoring, off in dreamland.

I thought I’d crashed out the first time I breastfed directly from Janet in front of her parents. Or when I confessed my feelings to my Amazons via a stuffed animal. Or when I’d introduced myself as Clark Grange and wore a baby bonnet and gown all night.

This was lower: There was no threat; no pressure on me to conform to a manufactured trap; no room for ulterior motives or narratives of performance and forced compliance. I was just a Little boy who didn’t want to do his self-assigned homework, so I got distracted watching T.V., drank a bottle, pooped my pants, and went to sleep after the credits. I lacked the excuse of lust or any other ulterior motives that might further. I was just tired, bored, comfortable, and using my pants as a toilet didn’t seem like such a big deal at the moment.

It wasn’t and that wasn’t the problem.

**********************************************************************************************

I stormed ahead of Janet and knocked on Beouf’s classroom door with fury and authority. It swung out and almost clipped me. “Well hello!” Beouf beamed. “How are you today, Cla-?”

“Move!” I interrupted her. “I need to break shit.” I turned sideways and slid right by her. I waddled to where the old Nap Room used to be.

“Oh!” Beouf replied, obviously confused if not annoyed. “Well okay then!”

My teacher asked my Mommy if everything was alright, and Mommy started explaining in her own limited view what had crawled up inside me, twisted, and died.

“He fell asleep early last night,” she said. “Solstice finally caught back up to him, and he’s cranky that he didn’t get to visit Amy at Little Voices last night.”

She was right of course. After Princeton Vance took his bow alongside the Muffets the rest of my night involved dreamless sleep, and me only waking up long enough for a diaper change, more milk, a bath, getting redressed into jammies, breastfed and then lowered into my crib. And the space of time between those events was indistinguishable from one another. Time hadn’t blurred like that for me since my last birthday party.

“Is he mad at you?”

“No, I think he just wants to get some frustrations out before breakfast without getting in trouble.”

“Yeah,” Beouf agreed. “I understand that.”

“Too bad we can’t do that.”

“Amen, sister. Amen!”

I was already in the tantrum room and swinging for the fences, when Jessica and Tracy came in the back. I was disappointed that the table leg hadn’t splintered when I broke it off- it was designed to do that- but it made a dandy club for wrecking other displays. I grinned as a put a sizeable dent a little red wagon. “Fix that…” I spat.

Adding to my discomfort was the rash cream that was smeared all over my backside. My cheeks felt like two halves of a peanut butter sandwich. Janet had waited too long to change her sleeping baby boy and she’d overcompensated on the skin care. I was perfectly clean and dry but still felt like I was wallowing in filth. That today’s outfit was basically a footed sleeper and a matching knit cap didn’t make me feel any bigger.

My one consolation in that regard was that the weather would get too hot for such heavy fleecy things in just a week or three. Then it’d be back to onesies and sailor suits…

“Hi, Ivy,” I called just as she was crossing the threshold. The usual tights she wore under her dresses had given way to full on leggings. I actually couldn’t see the decorations on her diaper when she did her stupid exaggerated curtsy.

“Hello, Clark!” she chirped. “Can I ask you a question?”

I started playing tee ball with the collection of stuffies. “Can I still wreck stuff?” We were minutes if not seconds from Zoge leashing us up and dragging us out to the bus.

“Yes.”

“Are you gonna tell on me if I say a bad word or something?”

“Shit no!” Ivy looked around the sound dampening room, as if afraid her mother would still overhear. She let out a stifled giggle a second later, seeing that no reprimand was coming.

I chuckled to myself and broke a bear’s neck with a single swing. “What’s up, then?”

“Is Mother Solstice real?” she asked, out of nowhere.

I stopped my swing and sucked in my breath. “Why do you ask?” Of course Ivy believed in Mother Solstice. Why wouldn’t she?

“I write her every year asking for things. Aaaaand some things she gives me, and some things she doesn’t.”

“Like what?” I asked. Truth be told, I wasn’t that interested in her response. I was just buying myself time. If she still actually believed in Mother Solstice, I wasn’t going to be the one that spoiled that for her. I’m an asshole, not a monster.

Ivy started rocking on the soles of her feet. “Like, I keep asking for a Paula Potty doll.”

I leaned on the broken off table leg like it was a cane. I think I used to have one in my classroom. Tried using it as a potty training aid. It…did not go well. Turns out that turning potty training into a game makes three and four year olds not take potty training seriously. “Isn’t that one of those dolls that pees?”

Ivy nodded so hard her pigtails became propellers. “Uh-huh!” she grinned. “Only it comes with its own tiny doll potty instead of a diaper.”

I sucked on my teeth. Zoge didn’t want her daughter even considering potty training as a pretend activity. I wondered if telling Zoge about how badly some of my kids had failed that first year would change her mind.

“Grown-Ups have final say about what Mother Solstice gives to their kiddos,” I fibbed. “Your Mommy must not want you to have that doll.” A dark smirk came over me. I’d thrown Zoge under the bus without breaking the girl’s fantasy myself.

Something seemed to click in Ivy’s mind. “Ooooooh!” She said, “That makes sense! Did you know that because you used to be a Grown-Up?”

I sighed and drooped my head. “Yeah. That’s why.”

“Ivy! Clark! Come now, my loves! It’s time to go to the bus!”

“Coming Mommy!” Ivy called back through the open door. She waved me toward her. “Come on, Clark! We gotta go!”

Damn. Not nearly enough destruction for my tastes. There was an entire side of the room that I hadn’t taken the time to destroy. “Yeah,” I said. “Go on. I’m gonna trash one more thing.”

The poor girl believed me because it wasn’t a lie. She crinkled out, screaming to her Mommy that she was coming, even though Zoge was only at the front entrance and had eyes with which to see. I shut the door behind Ivy and leaned against it with my eyes closed. I just needed a second without complete cooing nonsense.

“BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Tidyup Protocol Engaged!’

The little bot in the corner behind the door zoomed to life, speeding along the carpet as dozens of metallic arms sprung out the top of it. I cannot accurately describe the terrifying speed and fascinating precision that I witnessed with my very eyes while the roaming piece of hardware set everything back in place. Imagine a stack of dominoes being knocked down in reverse and you have an idea of how uncanny it all was.

Dents were buffed, stuffing was fluffed, and the carpet was vacuumed in just over five seconds. My impromptu baseball bat flung out of my hand with a magnetic pulse pulling the metal tipped leg to the table’s base.

The roar of machinery shut off momentarily. A red beam ran across the entirety of the wreck room. “Unsanctioned material detected.” The voice buzzed, deep and digitized. The thing charged at me with the speed of the cobra strike.

“HEL-!” I tried, but hooks and metal hands were digging into me and the muffed roar of the machine was more than enough to drown my cries out.

Cold air blew between my shoulder blades. The back of my sleeper had been ripped open. Shreds of fabric were torn off my body towards the roaring undercarriage of the bot. Amazon technology has always been beyond me, but I knew my clothing wasn’t getting stored in a dust bag.

Blades and scissors leapt out. Stray pieces of hair mingled with cotton being sucked up and destroyed. I cursed and yelled and cried. My lips formed all the proper four letter words, but even I couldn’t hear me.

“Beep-beep-beep! Child present. Tidyup paused.” The machine started powering down.

I looked back over my shoulder. Sure enough, my clothing was down to rags and my Monkeez was bulging out in all of its crinkling soft plastic backed glory. Some failsafe in the machine must have registered my underwear and pulled the plug.

That’s when I got smacked in the face.

WHOMP!

The door flew open and half a foot of wood conked me on the side of my head. I hit the floor and it didn’t even register until I was being cradled in Zoge’s arms and my shoulder started aching something fierce.

“Clark what did you do? You know you’re not supposed to close that door!” I started moaning in pain and embarrassment while she picked over me, mumbling to herself in Yamatoan. “Does this hurt?” She finally said. “Does this? Move this?”

I grit my teeth and shook my head as I slowly sucked air back into my lungs and regained my ability to speak. “I’m…okay…”

“No you are not, young man.” Zoge said in a tone that was the closest I’d ever heard to her actually scolding me. “This is why we do not close the Wreck Room door! Ever!”

My head pounding, I nodded submissively. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

This fucking sucked. I was tearing up and taking comfort from a Grown-Up who literally was old enough to be my mother. The cute and comfy outfit that my Mommy had bought for me was now trashed and I was going to have to wear Lost & Found hand-me-downs while being late for the bus if not breakfast. That and I still didn’t need a diaper change so there was no way to get some of the excess paste off my butt.

Great. Now I was legitimately fucking things up on accident, with no ill intent or malicious compliance whatsoever. Was it even a reckless plan backfiring if there was no plan to begin with? Or was it just an embarrassing ‘oopsie’.

Typical, Clark.

Typical.