Maybe everyone should be tagged like deer. A little barcode right under your skin. Every mother and baby and daddy, and all the oldies and youngies and lonelies, and all the quiet kids, and all the ones who won’t shut up. But mostly all the ones who laugh at me. Then I could sit in a velvet chair in Washington D.C. and watch all the barcodes live their lives, and if anyone ever laughed at me, I’d just smile, and type in a barcode into a computer like the one daddy had, and they would explode in a million pieces and their ugly mugs would just be quiet already. Sometimes I do wonder about barcodes. I could explode everyone, and that would save the rainforests. So I’d have to make sure I didn’t give the monkeys barcodes, because Ms. Watson said they live in the rainforests, and I’ll be darned if I ever heard a monkey laugh at me.


Sometimes I also wonder about a remote-controlled sky. A little rabbit-eared antenna right on the moon. Then nobody would ever have a ruined picnic, and the sun would always shine, except when someone was sad. Then you could pull out your remote and fog up the world, and bring in some clouds, and everyone could be sad with you. But I wouldn’t do that; I wouldn’t want that. Ms. Watson always says, “Let it out, Marshall. The world will understand what you’ve been through,” but I don’t think they do. And I don’t think I would let them. The world didn’t know Daddy enough to cry with me. So. A remote-controlled sky would be magnificent.

I went yesterday to buy a little tree to plant in the backyard, because Ms. Watson said it could represent my Daddy, or something about love or growing or what not. I thought it was a stupid idea. My daddy wasn’t a tree, and if he was, then I’d be a pinecone, which I learned in school are the trees’ babies, and I sure as heck am NOT a pinecone. I said that to Ms. Watson, and she blabbed about symbolism or something rather dull like that. But she insisted, and so I had to go to the stupid garden shop in the part of town that crazy Mr. Hallerson said was sketchy, and I went in the afternoon, which is apparently when they water their stupid plants, and I stepped in a puddle of mudwater and soaked my shoes. All for a silly little tree called Bonzai that WASN’T my Daddy.