I can’t sleep. Dada. Hiss. Moon in the window. My flower undies. Rocking yellow wicker. White soft sheets. Warm. Rocking. Yawn. Creak. Rocking chair.

The whiffle ball and bat are still in the car. They are brand new. I have to practice for when I’m older and can join the major leagues. I’m not even five yet, but Mom says it’s okay to go across the street to the car and get them. Mom gives me the keys. They’re in the back seat, so I have to unlock the door in the front because there’s no keyhole in the back. I can crawl in the back real easy, which is more fun and faster than unlocking the back door. I crawl back into the driver seat and decide to put my bat and ball in the passenger seat. I’m the driver. Vroom, vroom! I turn the wheel and peer over the dashboard. The wheel doesn’t move when the car is off, but I can pretend. I can see pretty good when I sit on my knees. Suddenly I’m not pretending. The trees are moving, and I’m going down the hill. I’m in so much trouble. I’m stopped and I don’t remember crashing into the tree. I’m in the yard again but Mom’s there and she’s screaming at me.

Meatloaf had five kittens. Then she had another four later. They seem kind of dirty to me and I think they need a bath. I asked the fishies if I could use their water. They don’t mind. There is a little light at the top of the tank so I can see the kitties swimming around. They’re having fun meowing and swimming around. Mom comes in and she’s mad. She’s drying the kitties and she won’t let me pet them, even though I asked. I said please.

You can run all the way from the kitchen, into the living room, into mom and dad’s room, and jump onto the bed. You can’t do it when mom’s sleeping during the day. You can’t do it when dad’s sleeping at night. But, when mom goes to work, then we can play roll ’em! Dada rolls and we fall down if we don’t jump over him. He also has the recking-ball lemon-squeezer. It’s really just his cast and his leg. He’ll squeeze us if he can catch us, but he never catches me. I’m too fast.

When you are watching television and you turn it off or change the channel, why isn’t it the same thing you were watching when you turn it back on? Why can you do that with the movies as Grouchy Grandma’s house?

Chris said that if I pick up all his baseball cards for him, then I get to keep them. He really doesn’t want to clean his room. So, I pick up every single card, even the ones under his bed which smells like pee. After I’m done, he laughs at me and takes the box of cards. I put my hands on my hips and tell him that he’d better give me them or I’ll call the police on him. He laughs. Dada walks into the doorway. He tells Chris to give me the cards. He tells Chris not to make deals he can’t keep. Don’t be an Indian-giver.

It’s in the middle of the night and I’m creeping out of my bedroom and into the kitchen. Dada is in the living room next door, so I can see a little. I crawl onto a chair and then the kitchen table. There’s almost a whole stick of butter in the dish. Midnight snack. I make it back to my bed undetected.

When Dada helps me change clothes, he tells me to lift up my arms so he can take my shirt off. Sometimes he doesn’t do it all the way and the shirt is stuck on my head. He tells me I have a nice hat.

We live in a triple decker which means there are people living upstairs. One of the people is boy older than me. He’s as old as my brother, but he’s not like my brother. He hates my brother and together we make fun of him. Sometimes though he plays with my brother instead and they make fun of me. They can both say the alphabet faster than me. They say that means that they’re smarter.

I’m playing pretty ponies and little people when my brother opens the door and farts. He closes the door and runs away laughing.

Every once in a great while my dad smokes a cigar. I don’t like the smell, especially when it gets in my room, but it’s funny when he puts it in the plastic Halloween pumpkin’s mouth. The pumpkin looks funny smoking.

On one side of the triple-decker there is a bank-in. It’s steep, with trees, but then gets flat again at the bottom. We’re not supposed to play there, but we do. We even have a fort. Chris doesn’t play fair, though. Chris only has fun if I’m not having any. He’s laughing in the bank-in. I’m at the top. I’m going to go tell mom and dad, but they won’t do anything. If I scare him so we won’t laugh at me again. I find a rock I can barely lift. I throw it next to him, down the bank-in. It’s heavy, but the slope helps. It hits his head. He falls down. He screams. I stand at the top of the bank-in. I just watch him scream. My parents come and take him, yell at me. No one believes that I didn’t mean to hit him.

We have a stone wall in the back running along the apartment. It is between the side of the yard where the swing set is and the side of the yard with the bank-in. The wall has a bit of ground at the top of it, then a fence that separates us from another apartment. Sometimes we climb up and sit there. Is being off the wall when you are on the wall and jump off? The jumping doesn’t last very long and it’s not very high up. I don’t get it.

Mom says that we are human beans. God is not a human bean, though. He is just a bean. I don’t think that makes sense. I think he’s kind of like a cloud that looks like the face of a man, the man in the moon. What do we have to do with beans? What kind of beans?

When Chris is mean to me I tell him I’m going to call the police on him. Sometimes he believes me and stops being mean. He doesn’t believe me this time, so I pick up the phone to call the police. I put it to my ear and a man’s voice says, “This is the police.” I scream and put down the phone. Dad comes in laughing. It was him on the other phone. I didn’t know you could do that.