What did you get "me" for "his" birthday?

'Happy Birthday Carl' lettered quite perfectly with blue cursive icing on a white-frosted cake. Six candles ablaze. One for each year, and the last for good luck. It is decorated with thick red, blue and yellow sugary balloons and topped with a bright red firetruck, Carl's preferred toy. "How touching," Chris mocks with grim sobriety.

"It looks good," Chris laments. "Too good to be sitting on the countertop. Why not adorn it with the Great Star of Africa and leave it under impenetrable plexiglass or smoosh it on canvas, frame it, and hang it on a wall in the Louvre?"

Chris, like a shark, circles the countertop, glaring with malintent across each passing. If his large, black, dilated eyes had teeth, Chris would have a stomachache right about now.

"I wonder if I had a cake on my fifth birthday" he contemplates. Chris tries to recall four years ago. He scrunches his face, holding two fingers to each temple, imagining a temporal shift: the time-space fabric tearing at its seams. A distorted facsimile replaces the clarity of 'now.' Crisp sounds exchanging for dull echoes; images blurring, and entering a squiggly phase - the squiggly phase, a hallmark of time-travelling adventures…

"Oh, yes, I remember it well…"

Four years and several months earlier ought to have been one of the greatest days ever. Yet, Mom and Dad remain in doleful slumber. Only my pattering feet and restless scurrying disrupts the silence.

"If my calculations are correct" (Chris performs some mental math; carrying the one), "in but an hour, an orange glow will overtake night. If I am to solve The Great Mystery of My Fifth Birthday, I must do so now. Before the chicken's third crow. Time is not my friend!"

But apathy is a disease, and all are infected. It has drained Mom and Dad's strength, and this condition is the only explanation for the morning's stillness - no sign of movement, tossing or turning. Perhaps they are dead. "I suppose I'll need a job. Something afterschool, like being a policeman or astronaut." Chris looks through the window, spying the Sunday paper bundled in rubber-band and laying still at the end of the driveway. "Later, after reading the comics, I will search the want-ads and circle the highest-paying police and astronaut jobs with Dad's red marker. I'll probably ask for fries as my French benefits. But, first, I must begin this quest. Surely Mom and Dad's last deed was to wrap my gifts and hide them away. I must embark on this heroic journey, if only to honor their lost, departed souls."

In the distance, a chicken crows…

"What exactly am I looking for? God only knows. Did I leave destruction and chaos in my wake? Caused too much ruckus during my fourth year of life? Parents, unlike Santa, aren't under the obligation and restriction of a naughty-and-nice list. If my calculations are right…" (Chris divides the number of possible bad deeds by his age and multiplies this sum by a generous but fair estimate of his good deeds) ... "By the power of Grey Skull! My math, if correct, practically guarantees that I am deserving toys in excess of 5 chests of Spanish Gold!"

"Now, where would one hide such an enormity of bounty?"

An incandescent lightbulb flickers above Chris' head. He looks up, "Someone ought to fix that thing." Dashing to the den, Chris falls flat on his belly and searches under the couch. Reaching and stretching, grasping and clawing, Chris returns with nothing but a dust-covered arm.

"Too obvious. Think Chris, think!" Chris desperately pleads.

Chris paces. Circumnavigating and whirling along the rug's orbit. "If I was playing hide-and-seek and if I was a mountain of toys, where would I hide?" Chris ponders.

Chris raises his finger towards the heavens and flings back his head. "The closet! Obvious, surely, but Mom and Dad are the agents of this deception, and they lack the Sinead O'Conner (Chris says with his best French accent) to pull off such an operation of concealment."

Chris swings open the closet door, bends at the waist, and rummages through the jetsam. Boots, a tire pump, deflated pool floats, and the vacuum are tossed… revealing… nothing? Discovering a barren floor, Chris pulls the jackets from their hangers, discarding them into a mountain-high pile outside the door. 

Still nothing. Chris stands inside the unfruitful closet, examining his surroundings. "This house was built before I was born. Likely, previous generations - such as the Vikings - created secret doors and passages to smuggle goods through tunnels underground." Chris runs his hands against the closet's back wall, his fingers feeling for levers, seams, or buttons. Confused by a lack of indications, Chris steps back, re-examining the rear of the closet. He rests his hands on his hips, arms akimbo, baffled by another dead end.

"Son of a…" Chris laments. "This calls for the "Summoning." Chris steadies three fingers, kisses the tips, and presses them to his forehead. "Love my brain" he utters thricely, completing the powerful Thinking Ritual. Thinking… thinking… thinking harder still…

"Of course! The forbidden zone!" Chris seizes a broom from the kitchen. He darts and dodges across, over and under chairs and tables while the broom handle smacks various lamps, frames, and vases. Finally, Chris with exhausted but excited breath arrives at the garage door.

"Chris, never, NEVER go into here" has always been his parents' mantra and warning. A clever tactic premeditatedly designed for this very day. "Mom and Dad are not as stupid as they look or act or talk or as they generally come across" surmises Chris. "Never go into the garage? That's like saying, 'Don't eat the cake.' An order by temptation!"

He lifts the broom handle, accidentally and repeatedly banging it against the wall. He lifts the handle to the top corner, where a hook falls upon a latch, preventing entry. It's hard to aim the handle squarely on the hook and, when latch and handle finally meet, there is hardly any wiggling. "Dad says that persistence gets you farther than brilliance. But with both, he will see, I can breach his diabolical security!" Chris gives two more tries with depreciating effort then affirms, "Probably not here."

In the distance, a chicken crows…

"Those little bastoons!" declares Chris. "Obviously, they would keep the treasures in close proximity; heavily guarded. I bet they stayed awake all night, sitting in watch, crisscross at the foot of the bed. No wonder they remain asleep - clearly, they are exhausted." Chris tiptoes to their bedroom, presses an ear against the bedroom door and listens. Not a squeak or shuffle or turn or toss. He grabs the doorknob, slowly pushing the door open. Chris peers through the door's slim divide. "There's a chance, a good chance indeed, that, rather than bodies, pillows and basketballs lay under the blanket. A decoy that would fool most others, but not me, not today" Chris assesses.

He creeps into the room, eyes scanning side-to-side, up-and-down, and diagonal-across-diagonal. Falling to all fours, Chris begins a methodical crawl. "On most nights, under-the-bed harbors the fiercest monsters, most evil of witches, and rabid of beasts." Chris ponders the dangers. "But" he reasons, "can monsters, witches or beasts AND mountains of toys fit under the bed? No," Chris attempts mental subtraction; borrowing a one, "inconceivable!" Chris speaks the word, likely not using it how it means.

Chris approaches the footboard, smelling Dad's nasty, stinky feet. Dad's snoring, though rhythmic and peaceful, is essentially the auditory equivalent of 'Beware of Dog!" But, this device of warning becomes shelter, softening any of this heist's unintended, unwelcome sounds.

Chris' body remains on the outside of the bed, but his arm stretches, feeling for something, anything. "Wrappers. Hmm.. Left here by a witch during a midnight snack, most likely." Chris stretches further, he feels something. Something just beyond his reach. Chris turns his head away and closes his eyes tighter. "There is something there, I just know it. If only…"

Chris grabs an edge, pulling it closer. Yet, he senses the time-space fabric repairing itself. The clock's second-hand thumping louder, quicker. "Time is not on my side!" Chris reaches more frantically. Dad's snoring, once wailing like a tornado siren, softens to a muffle. His socks, less pungent now, are overcome by the smells of oranges, dish detergent, and… frosting. The crispness of this timeline blurring and bending. Chris scans under the bed’s dark undercarriage. "Is that a box? A ribbon? Spanish Gold???" Squiggles. Cursed squiggles! As Chris' fingers clasp the treasure, he finds himself no longer on hands and knees, but standing… in the kitchen, beside the cake…

In the distance, a chicken crows.

*****

Chris eyes a calendar, magnetized to the refrigerator. Saturday the seventh, circled in red. Chris may never learn of the treasures discovered on his own birthday, four years ago. His parents, though fairly dutiful, are poor record-keepers. Four years and several months ago, there were no manifests, no captain logs, no historical records. Chris sighs. "Evidently, there was no Spanish Gold. No pile of gifts celebrating the birth of their first and favorite son. Carl's fifth birthday pronounced by cake, mine marked by a dust covered arm. Seems fair."

Shuffling echoes down the hallway from the furthest bedroom. Carl is awake. He will see his cake, sit mere inches from the TV watching Paw Patrol, and wait for Mom and Dad's arrival. Such a waste of precious time. And me, here, starving. "If I was stranded on an island, I would have killed a pig or shook a coconut from a tree, and I would have already found a trove of candy bars buried in a chest under shallow sand. I would have something to eat by now. But, here, trapped in this thoughtless and uncaring prison, I am forced to go hungry. Let's see… my last meal was a snack before bed. If I do my math right…" Chris tries math, finds the remainder "This means I haven't eaten in more than 48 hours! My stomach will be growling eventually. When will I begin hallucinating? Has it begun already? Am I actually strapped to a hospital bed with tubes running up my arms?" Chris wrestles himself from imaginary wrist clamps and pinches himself.

Carl's plastic-bottomed feet shamble down the hall. He is wearing his Paw Patrol one-piece pajamas, rubbing his eyes as he bounces from wall to wall.

"For the love of all that is holy, Carl" Chris speaks loudly, "Do you know what today is?"

Carl squints, lifts his head, and mumbles.

"It's your birthday. And there is cake here. And mom and dad are probably dead."

Carl opens his eyes slightly wider, shrugs, and resumes squinting and shuffling.

"Now, the way I see it," Chris begins, "We need the basics. We need shelter. CHECK! Got it." Chris says pointing to the ceiling. "We need weapons. CHECK." Chris gestures to a broomstick resting by the garage door. "We need food. Hmmm… Food." Chris performs pantomime, tapping his chin and standing conspicuously by the cake sitting on the counter. 

"Do you have any ideas?" Chris asks impatiently. Clearly, Carl has already succumbed to the later stages of starvation. Carl has lost all faculty, which explains the wobbling, and shuffling, and squinting. He lost his sight and communication skills. The deterioration is rapid. "My name is Chris. I am your brother. This is the year of our Lord, two-thousand twenty-four!" Chris enunciates loudly, slowly. "Oh my!" Chris worries, "My brother is a fruit basket. An inedible fruit basket!"

Chris grabs Carl by the shoulder and pulls him to the counter. "Carl, this is what we gotta do. Normally, you know me, I wouldn't ask this of you. But these are dire times. Dire, I say!" Grasping the Paw Patrol pajamas with one hand, Chris pulls the cake closer with the other.

"Carl, you are young, pretty stupid… no offense… and clearly showing all the symptoms of starvation," Chris looks sympathetically at Carl. "But, there's protocol. It's a big word, I know. Essentially, it means that you have to be the first to touch the cake and eat a bite. Listen, I don't make the rules but, if we want to live, you have to do this!"

Carl looks at Chris, tilting his head. "Chris, I want to watch Paw Patrol."

"Paw Patrol? Paw Patrol??? If you won't take a piece of cake as is your God-given right and, might I add, your civic duty and, might I add, the most important decision you will make in your life, then at least do it for me. Have I ever steered you wrong?"

Carl's thoughts immediately recall dozens of times when Chris caused unimaginable chaos - and that was just yesterday. Carl readies to protest. But it was too late. Chris grabs a handful of cake and shoves it into Carl's open mouth.

Carl stands clown faced. His lips covered with red frosting, his eyelids colored with frosty blue, white icing on his forehead, and yellow frosting globed in his hair.

A flushing toilet echoes in the distance. "Could it be? Mom and Dad are alive?" Chris' mind races and immediately thinks, "Ok, well, I don't need to read the paper today for astronaut jobs."

Chis realizes his brother's peril was afoot. "No, I will not let my little brother take the fall. He is too young to bare Mom and Dad's wrath. His tiny ears are not calloused by time and wisdom to stave off all their yelling. I will tell them that Carl is also a victim of these unfortunate circumstances. His undeveloped, immature brain and the consequences of starvation gave no alternative to his action, no matter how impulsive, reckless, and unthoughtful they may be. But first…"

Like walking dead, Mom and Dad stagger slowly down the hallway. Before crossing the kitchen's threshold, Chris appears suddenly. "Carl got a cake and fire truck and probably lots and lots of toys for his fifth birthday, and I got nothing. Nothing!"

Dad removes the sleep from his eyes, looks lazily down at Chris and drones, "You got an XBOX, we had a party at Chuck-N-Cheese, and we went to Disney the following week."

Chris thinks, recalling that birthday. "Oh, yeah, that was pretty cool."

Carl pokes Chris "You're it!" and runs away laughing.

Chris smirks and chases. 

In the distance, the dogs bark.