TNT and Cereal

At seven years old, Grant’s Saturday morning routine was always the same: pajamas, cereal, cartoons. It was a recipe for success.

This morning, Grant had pulled his favorite bowl from the second shelf - a chipped purple and dingy gray bowl. It was the perfect shape to cup in his hands and the spoon settled into the chip snuggly. A thin layer of grime clung to the sides, but Grant just wiped it out with a small ball of spit and his palm.

Three bags of mostly eaten cereal were pushed into the bottom of a drawer, crushed wheat and sugar. Grant tugged the second one out, unfurling the crinkling plastic and messily pouring it into the bowl’s awaiting mouth.

A sniff of the milk carton told him much more than the smudged date stamped in black on the lip. Despite her love of orange juice and vodka, his mom was still buying groceries pretty regularly, but the milk sometimes vacationed for hours on the counter before one of them returned it to its home on the cool ledge of the refrigerator. Dry cereal would have to do.

He settled into the worn spot on the brown and navy speckled rug. Grabbing the remote, he tried to flip on the television, but nothing happened. Not even a blip of color.

“Batteries out again,” Grant mumbled, leaning forward to switch it on via the front panel. The green light glowed, announcing the television had come to life. Some days, that luminescent flickering was the only other sign of life Grant saw in a day. Though he could often hear the unsettling breaths of his birth giver a few doorways away, the times she joined the world of the living had been few and far between the last few weeks.

“Just a case of the weepies,” she had insisted yesterday afternoon, taking a brimming glass into her room and shutting the door.

Grant repositioned himself, moving to fold his legs beneath him, and a few wheat stars and multi-colored marshmallows slid onto the floor from his collection of off-brand Lucky Charms.

The blinds were pulled tight, but snippets of sun shone through into the small living room. A thin slit of light slashed through the television at a diagonal.

“Meep-meep!” The Roadrunner sprinted across the fuzzy screen, a plume of billowing dust in his wake. Stretching out before him was a winding road of black pavement. Behind him, golden hills reached for the sky while green tufts of grass clung to their backs.

Wile E. Coyote was quick on his tail, a knife and fork clutched in his paws as he ran. But of course, the bird was much too fast, even for someone as starving as said Coyote.

“Next plan, buddy,” Grant mumbled into his stale cereal.

Blueprints appeared, crudely sketched plans spread out on a makeshift drawing board. It was a childishly sketched image of a cliff with dots and dashes to represent the planned path of an anvil. A stick figure with big feet represented the coyote. A scribbled figure with two large, frilled circles trailing it was the Roadrunner.

“Way too many unknowns for that to work,” Grant commented, shaking his head at the proposed plan.

As always, the flattened form of Sir Coyote appeared in the bottom of the valley, the anvil coming to meet his immovable form with a resonating clang, and said Roadrunner was nowhere in sight.

Next, Wile E. approached a crossroads with twinkling tones accompanying his tiptoes. A lit match was poised between his extended finger and thumb; the intended target? A wooden crate marked with stretching red letters: T-N-T. He had carefully coated each plank of wood with a thick layer of invisible paint until only a tuft of the wick was still exposed.

Somehow, the Roadrunner sped past the lit weapon unscathed. The box of TNT fizzled, seeming to fail. As the Coyote approached, though, an explosion filled the screen with widening layers of color and light; the predator was reduced to a grayed outline of ash.

“Physics and cartoons don’t mix,” Grant yelled. “Dumb Coyote.” He tossed a sugary stone at the television screen, perfectly timed to pelt Coyote in his widened, craze-spun eye.

At seven, Grant was still invincible, unbeatable.

That oversized bird would never have stood a chance.