A Day in the Life of Ronald’s Version of Reality

Ronald liked to think of himself as a creative inventor. Not a creator of machines or even gadgets, though he did once tape two fans to a chair and called it a “hovercraft.” That, however, got him being banned for life from the garage by his father. Oh no, he was the master inventor of what he thought were legitimate excuses to get out of doing anything. And not just any excuses. No, not from Ronald. He was a connoisseur of absurdity when it came to a creative excuse. He was the craftsman of the unbelievable. At just 12-years-old, he was a boy with the imagination of ten wizards on the ultimate sugar high.

On a mild Saturday morning, with the sunshine trying its best to shine through his half-open blinds, and noisy birds singing far too cheerfully outside for him to sleep, Ronald buried his head under his pillow in the faint hope of going back to sleep. But then, from the kitchen came the familiar clinks of spoons, plates, and the whirring of the blender, with the odd punctuation of a cupboard closing too loudly for Ronald when he would rather be surrounded by silence. This told Ronald just one thing. It was a sure sign that his mother was already up, and busy orchestrating the family’s day like a conductor trying to manage flees on a dog.

“Ronald!” came her voice. It was sharp in a cheerful, but dangerous way. He knew that tone. It was not good.

He groaned dramatically, pulling the blanket over his head like it might shield him from responsibility. “Why does she always yell like that when I’m in the middle of something very important?” he muttered to no one other than the poster of a velociraptor barely still hanging on the wall.

A knock at the door. Then the dramatic pause, and then came that creak as the door opened.

“Are you pretending to be in a coma again?” She asked, in her usual pose of her arms crossed and an eyebrow lifted.

“I was working on a dream prototype,” Ronald Mumbled from under the pillow. “It takes very delicate brainwork to compose correctly, but you ruined it.”

“Good. Now get your lazy ass out of that bed. And don’t forget to bring your homework down with you. Mrs Delaney emailed me… Yet again.”

He sat up slowly, yawning theatrically and ruffling his hair into even more of a mess. “Ah homework, right? Funny story about that...”

His mother didn’t even blink. “Oh, I’m sure it will be hilarious. Bring it downstairs. Now.”

As she turned and walked away, Ronald sighed and looked at his backpack like it had betrayed him. He tiptoed over, picked it up and unzipped it just enough to reveal the crumpled worksheet Mrs Delaney gave him, and a chocolate bar wrapper from what was supposed to be his “reward snack” after doing the homework, stuck to it like it had been attached with crazy glue. Oops.

He called downstairs, “Yeah, so... I was in the process of writing it, but the pencil I was using suddenly started writing in ancient Greek. I think it’s haunted. You probably don’t want that kind of energy in the house. Do you?”

There was silence to start with, he wasn’t sure what would come next, but he didn’t have to wait long.

“Do you want to see what a haunted sandal looks like flying at your head?”

Ronald decided this wasn’t the time for further explanations.

By breakfast, he had managed to finally come downstairs, hair still pointing in all directions and his mismatched socks, one blue, one a dark shade of red with cartoon avocados smoking a joint.

“Ronnie, can you at least try to look like you live with human beings?” his older sister, Jasmine, asked with a smirk on her face while sipping her smoothie with the calm judgment of a high priestess.

He squinted at her and smiled. “I am trying. But this is how my hair grows naturally. I’m actually conducting a science experiment on follicle freedom.”

His mother slid a plate of eggs in front of him. “Eat. Then tidy your room. It smells like something threw up in there.”

Ronald forked some eggs into his mouth dramatically, then sighed. “See, I would, but I think the room has evolved into its own habitat. There’s a delicate sock-monster colony living under my bed. I can’t just go in and wreck their home, can I? That would be cruel.”

Jasmine almost choked on her smoothie, spraying tiny purple ice balls over the table.

“Is this what you’re submitting for science class?” she coughed as she tried to recover.

“I’m thinking of the Nobel Prize, actually,” Ronald said calmly, reaching for the ketchup.

Just an hour later, Ronald was sitting in the hallway, staring at the overflowing rubbish bag by the door. He was meant to have taken it out. The bag was tied and everything ready to go. All he had to do was pick it up, walk outside, and dump it in the bin. A simple enough job for any normal child.

But Ronald?

“I read an interesting thing recently,” he said as his mother passed by with a laundry basket, “that rubbish bags are, well, like, semi-conscious. And if you throw them out too soon, they get sad and lonely. Like... they have been abandoned. I don’t want to be that guy, Mum.”

His mother had heard some doozies from Ronald, but this. It stopped her dead in her tracks. She stared at him like she wasn’t entirely sure he was real.

“I gave birth to you,” she said. “I know that you can lift a bag of rubbish. Go. Outside. Now. With it. And put it in the bin.”

“But—”

“Now, Ronald.” She said, biting her tongue, not wanting to lose her temper with him.

He groaned like someone had just asked him to carry a boulder up a mountain, the way he was dragging his feet toward the back door like a prisoner.

When lunch rolled around, Ronald had managed to duck out of brushing his teeth by swearing his toothbrush had eloped with the toothpaste. “They were always flirting,” he explained gravely. “I think they’ve finally run off to start a new life together. I expect they eloped to Paris on the Eurostar.”

“Your breath is so bad it could kill an onion,” Jasmine muttered as she passed.

And when asked to comb his hair?

“Oh no. Can’t. I’m cultivating it for a school project. ‘The Psychology of Chaos.’”

His mother stared at him so hard he swore her eyeballs were charging up some kind of heat beam ready to zap him.

Afternoon brought more demands on Ronald.

“Ronnie, lay the table, please.”

He glanced up from his phone, and the tweet he was reading, a story about Barny the barnacle and Whinny the winkle who went to sea on the back of a humpback whale. He looked up with the mournful look of someone being asked to give up a kidney.

“But Mum, I would, I swear, but... the fork and spoon are still not speaking to each other after the mashed potato incident. I just… well, I can’t be in the middle of that tension again. It’s emotionally exhausting. You understand, don’t you?”

From the living room, Dad chuckled. “That’s a new one. I haven’t heard that one before.”

Ronald took it as encouragement, until he added, “feed the dog. Now.”

“I can’t. He’s in the middle of intermittent fasting right now. He is trying to get a leaner silhouette.”

Really, well, once you have fed the dog, you can bring in his new sack of food from the car and put it in the pantry. “But Dad, I checked my horoscope, and it shows Capricorn with Libra rising. It said, ‘Do not engage in manual labour today.’ I gotta respect the stars, don’t I?” He stated.

An hour later, his mother came back in from hanging out the washing and asked, “You are meant to be playing that piece at your cousin’s birthday party next week, but I have not heard you doing any piano practice?

“But the piano needs a break. It told me, through creaks and sighs, that it’s not feeling heard as an instrument.”

His sister Jasmine jumped straight in. “Those weren’t creaks and sighs. That was the piano, crying out for mercy after your last attempt.”

“Fetch me your lunchbox from you school bag and wash it ready for Monday,” his mother instructed.

“I’m pretty sure something’s growing in there. Like a small civilization that is evolving into sentient beings. I can’t just destroy it.”

Every excuse he came up with, every twisted little fib and elaborate lie to get out of doing something, was building up to something. Because eventually, the house caught on. But he wasn’t sure how they cottoned on.

Jasmine started filming him in secret. She even made a montage: “The Chronicles of Ronald: The Excuses that defied all logic.”

His dad printed a list of every single excuse Ronald had used in the past month and taped the booklet to the fridge like a trophy.

And for his mother, she was exhausted; she was done with his crap.

So, one evening, after dinner, she called a “family meeting.” That alone was terrifying. But when Ronald entered the living room and saw a PowerPoint presentation titled “A Study in Avoidance: The Ronald Effect”, his stomach sank to his knees.

“Slide one,” Mum said, clicking the remote. It was a photo of his room. “Ecological sock-monsters? Really?”

Ronald tried a smile. “They’re very camera shy.” He explained.

“Slide two,” Jasmine said, taking over. A video played of him holding a toothbrush like it might explode. “Eloped to Paris, huh, really?”

“I stand by that one.” He said assuredly.

The entire room stared at him. Ronald could feel the walls closing in on him. His defences were crumbling.

Finally, his mother sat down beside him. Not exactly angry. Just tired. “Ronald,” she said, gently but firmly, “you are the most imaginative, creative, but totally ridiculous child I’ve ever known, or will probably ever know. But we need you to actually do things around here. You’re certainly capable. I see it every time you come up with these unbelievable stories. Just... use some of that brilliance for real life, okay? There is only so much time a sane person can put up with your bullshit.”

He looked down at his hands. Picked at a thread on his sleeve.

“I just...” he muttered. “It’s not that I don’t want to do things. It’s just so boring doing the same thing every day. And I guess, if I make it a little weird, at least it feels like it is something of mine.”

There was a pause. Then his mother smiled. “You want to feel like your life’s a story, then?”

He nodded.

“Then let’s make it a good one. One where the hero still does the dishes and puts out the rubbish when asked.”

That night, Ronald brushed his teeth. He even fed the dog, though he gave a whole speech about breaking the dogs fast respectfully.

And as he finally, finally, picked up his homework, he muttered, “Alright, haunted pencil... let’s do this right.”

Somewhere in the corner of his room, he was pretty sure the sock-monsters cheered.