An Inquiring Mind

Written for the Daily Flash Fiction Challenge with a word limit of 300.

The prompts: This story must contain the words: Tornado, scrape and time

An Inquiring Mind

The sound of the back screen door banging open caused Judy to look past the sheet she was hanging out to dry. A dog wearing a Mousekateer hat and a backpack flew out the door and around towards the front of the house.

Not a good sign, she thought to herself.

Bobby had a lot of – creative energy; especially when left alone. She’d only been outside for a few minutes; not enough time for him to do too much damage.

The scene was beyond belief. There was spaghetti on the wall. The entire contents of a box of Cheerios had been distributed across the floor with impressive uniformity. Bobby sat motionless in the corner wearing nothing but a Batman cape, some flippers and his older brother’s football helmet. He’d seen something the day before on Animal Planet that made him think being still was a good defensive strategy against large and aggressive animals.

His hope of going unnoticed was quickly dashed.

“What’s going on in here? It looks like a tornado came through our living room!”

She walked right over to Bobby, ruining forever his trust in television programming.

“Mom, it was an experiment. I was going to clean it all up. I wanted to see how much of the floor I could cover with a box of cereal.”

Such was the curse of raising a six-year-old genius.

“What about the spaghetti?”

“I was trying to see if it would stick to the wall longer than jelly bread.”

She followed his eyes to a neat row of Wonderbread slices starfished to the wall.

She handed him a spatula. “Scrape that stuff off before it dries.”

Smiling inwardly, she left him to his task. As she did so, all she could think of was, Where’d he learn to cook spaghetti?

Word count 300