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Another April Fool
This year, keep the tricks away.
I woke in the dark, disoriented by a silent midnight disturbance. The heat of my eleven-year-old son standing next to the bed gave him a presence I could feel but not see. It could mean only one thing.
“Are you sick?”
Mm-hmm.
“Are you gonna throw up?”
Mm-hmm.
Half-asleep and called to action — a receding territory of parenthood — I swung my legs out from under warm blankets, feet quick against the smooth hard floor, and hustled him to the bathroom, hoping to avoid an acidic, wretched clean-up in the dark, an event from which our night’s sleep could not be salvaged.
We got the toilet lid open just in time to hear the contents of his body to splash into it. In the darkness, my ears did the diagnosis. The rest of this night and tomorrow would be agony.
Then my son’s scratchy voice broke into my panicky mind:
“April Fools. That was water.”
That kid.
Maybe I have shared this story before? Maybe I have told you that I was so impressed with his inventiveness, his planning, and his perfect execution of his prank that I could not be irked because I was filled with admiration for a fellow prankster? Maybe I have…