Crispy Cotter's Suspended Sentence, Part 1

Year after year Mr. and Missus Canape Cotter listened to the string of teachers - Ms. Asheville, Mr. Dynamonstrous, Mrs. Duvalle, Mrs. Shrip-Noftenner - denounce their little boy as a miscreant and trouble a brewing.

"Better dull your kitchen knives cus in a few years that boy's gonna be a butcher," his third grade teacher - Ms. Doubleornothing - forewarned, drawing a macabre line across her throat.

The PTA meetings were the bane of the Cotter's existence. They couldn't understand how their sweet, little Crispy Cotter could be perceived as such a rabble-rouser. Crispy's report cards, especially in the section denoting behavior, were distressing. Mr. Cotter, a banker, stayed up late every night reading to Crispy from various holy books - the Bible, the Torah, Q'uran, the Bhagavad Gita, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Human All too Human - and Crispy was bright enough to understand the abstract ideals of morality and situational ethics and quid pro quo discussed in these texts. And yet not a week went by when Crispy didn't come home with a chastising red note pinned to his sweater, and when he descended from the rubber stairs of the yellow school bus and up the concrete stairs of his front porch, his mother would take one look at the red note and begin the inquisition.

"Was it Dedrix Groomstozen again?" Missus Cotter asked her son, his gaze cast to his untied shoelaces. "Did he poke you in the eye with a blue crayon again and you walloped him?"

"No, ma'am."

"Pancake Waffleson tried to steal the T-rex figurine out of your cubby like he usually does? Did you bloody his nose again?"

"No, ma'am."

"Sheldon Cetaceous spit on you during tumbling class again so you beat him with a broom handle?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well those three boys are the biggest bullies. The ones you have run-ins with most often. Don't tell me you made another enemy?"

Crispy shrugged. Missus Cotter unpinned the note and read it. Crispy snuck past her and sat attentively at the piano, awaiting his daily lesson.

"I don't understand what this means," Missus Canape said, her expression much like that of a rat swimming against the current. Whenever she was remiss her hair suddenly became entangled within itself. "Can you explain this?"

"No," Crispy said, playing the first few bars of Montimuto's Ode to Splayed Bacchus.

"Well," Missus Cotter resigned. "I guess I'll let your father have a look at this note when he comes home. Until then, let's work on your technique. I want you to focus on not lingering with your sixteenth notes. Sometimes you let them hang in the air like wet laundry."

Crispy looked at his mother and, as far as a boy of nine could have cognizance of such things, felt the tinge of recognizing irony.


Stay tuned, parts 2 and 3 (and who knows, maybe 4) will be posted soon.