Diving under the bed before Mommy could
come into his room and catch him, Kenji took out his prize to
look at again—he’d never managed to get his hands on Mommy’s
pretty red bandanna before, since she had always managed to get
it back before he could get to his room and hide. Giggling
softly before shushing himself so that she wouldn’t be able to
find him so easily, Kenji peeked out from under the edge of the
covers that hung off his bed.
Mommy was always telling him to make it.
When Kenji would point out that the bed was huge and he was too
tiny to make it right, she would just laugh and tell him that he
was right. Then she would help him make it, because she was so
much bigger. Now he wondered what it would be like to see Mommy
without her bandanna—it would be kind of fun to see what she
looked like with her hair down for once. When the door to his
room slid open, Kenji scooted back almost to the far wall of his
room.
He could hear her talking, wondering
where he was, and clapped his hands over his mouth so that he
wouldn’t give himself away by giggling. In the end, after she
had left his room laughing for some reason, Kenji crawled up to
the edge of his bed and peeked out. The door was closed, and he
was sure that he had seen Mommy walk out about a minute ago, but
she could be really tricky about things like that.
Kenji had learned that it was always
best to make sure that Mommy was really out of the room before
he came out of any hiding place. Looking around, and then
crawling to every place under his bed so that he could get a
clearer view of his entire room, Kenji found that she really
wasn’t anywhere in his room with him. Poking his head out from
under his bed, Kenji smiled—maybe he had really won this time.
When the door slid back open, he dove
back under the bed fast enough that he made the covers flap.
Looking back, he saw that Mommy had come back in—she had
probably been waiting just outside his door. He was still happy
that he’d managed to get back under the bed before she could
come back in and catch him, since Mommy could always buy another
bandanna, after all.
Scooting all the way under the bed until
his feet touched the wall, Kenji turned and against it. He knew
now that no matter how far Mommy reached under his bed she
wasn’t going to be able to catch him and pull him out. Kenji
giggled as he saw her hands reach under the bed, stopping just
short of him, and then disappear again; he giggled louder when
she started trying to get him to come out.
First she offered to make him some
riceballs, and then a plate of warm brownies. Daddy liked
Mommy’s brownies too, Kenji remembered. Maybe when Daddy came
home again, she could make him some. Kenji decided to ask her to
do that, right after she went away. When she lay down on the
floor, grinning at him, Kenji grinned back…
Kenji held up his prize—the bandanna
that he had just won—and looked at the spreading fire. It would
have been kind of pretty, if it hadn’t been so hot. Mommy seemed
to like it, since she was sitting in the middle of a big patch
of it. He just wondered why she was crying—if she was happy to
be there (and she had to be since she was smiling), then why was
she crying? Kenji was confused.
He tried going over, wanting to sit next
to her and ask why she was so sad, but the fire was too hot for
him. And, when he looked up, Kenji could see her shaking her
head at him. Maybe she didn’t want him to come and sit with her,
he thought, though he still wondered why she was crying. Maybe
the fire made her eyes hurt. Backing away, since the fire was
starting to spread across the floor toward him, Kenji looked
back up.
Mommy was still crying, but now she
looked almost happy. Kenji was more confused now, but as he
backed away from the spreading fire, he saw that that was what
seemed to make her happiest. Looking up at her face again, he
saw that she looked like she was trying to point him somewhere.
Turning to look at where her finger was
pointing, he saw his bed and Kenji wondered for
a minute just why she wanted him to go to bed right then.
But as the fire started spreading across
the floor again, Kenji thought that it might be a good idea for
him to be as far away from the spread of the fire as he could
get and saw her nodding at him from her place in the doorway of
his room. Smiling and nodding back, Kenji climbed up onto his
bed, pulling up the covers so they wouldn’t catch on fire, too.
He yawned—the heat was starting to make him sleepy.
Slumping down on his bed, his fingers
still curled around Mommy’s red bandanna, Kenji’s eyes slowly
closed. The air smelled funny and hot, and he noticed that it
was getting harder to breathe. As his awareness slipped further
and further away, he wondered why Mommy was screaming…