VERY BAD CHILDREN
By Nina Humphrey

Over for tea, her girlfriend began her ritual teasing, pretending shock when her finger turned up no dust on the top of the fridge. She herself laughed gaily, loudly attempting to cover the sound of uncontrollable foot-tapping that had begun when her sly eyes noticed a piece of lint stuck to her friend's black turtleneck. Child-debris, she thought a little snidely. In her childless household, all those dust motes had become her bad children. Very, very bad.

All her heaven-ward eye rolling during their tea had revealed a noose of white, dirty, ornately carved wood moulding encircling the apartment's ceiling. Suddenly enormously agitated, she pretended fatigue, and rushed her best friend out the door. She felt a thrill — no, no, an adrenaline frisson coursing her body in recognition of her lifetime’s epiphanal aha! moment. Dust was bad. It needed to be eliminated. AND IT FELL FROM ABOVE.

And there it was — all the twisting and turning of her compass had finally located it in the blizzard — the mother of all that was dirt, casting her debris down from the highest spot in the world. Entering tremendous hyper-focus and with a last, purposeful tug at her hairnet, she approached the wind-swept rock on her belly — she was determined not to allow even one fleck of dandruff to fall from her own great altitude onto the top of the top of the top of the world. She pulled out the kit prepared for the moment. Its pièce-de-résistance: the surgical-quality, quantum-fibered, pashminaed German duster she had gotten from her very best, glossy housewares catalog.

With one masterful swipe, it was over. Emotionally exhausted and breathing heavily, she lay on her overstuffed back in the snow next to the now-sterile rock. Too fast, too fast. It had taken too little time for ultimate satisfaction, and with a twinge of buyer's remorse she regretted not having simply brought her Swiffer. She took a self-congratulatory gulp of canned gas, noting her work's ultimate blessing, a falling star in the sky above. But as a sherpa wrestled her massive padded bulk over his shoulder to force a descent, her body went limp in horror as two words used up all the oxygen left in her brain: star dust.

© Copyright 2007 by Nina Humphrey

Nina Humphrey lives and writes in New York City.