Savage Tales

animals, lick lollipops, learn Chinese, bake lasagna, and many other activities far more profitable to the space of the mind than reading this gobbledygook."
    "All right, Sam, you need to settle down," said Mom. "You keep using the word gobbledygook and I'm not even sure what it means. All I know is that every time you use it your nostrils flare and your eyebrows bend in a way I didn't think possible, so I must assume it means something sinister."
    "Let's leave eyebrows out of this," said Jake, who wasn't really listening. I kicked his shin under the table.
    "Look, here's the point," I said. "Wait, what was I saying? Never mind."
    "Paper," said Mom.
    "Oh yeah. Look. Jake and I have looked this crap over and I think it's time we accept that we just don't have the cranial capacity to take it in. Give us something else. A coloring book."
    "No," said Mom. "Because I believe in you boys."
    "Even me?" said Jake.
    "Well, I believe in one of you boys."
    "Oh," said Jake. "Which one?"
    Instead of answering, Mom opened her purse and fished out her container of fish oil tablets. She popped it open and poured a handful into her hand. She shoved them into her whale of a mouth and swallowed them dry style, like they do at the Olympics.
    "I'm really thirsty," said Mom.
    "It's the chemicals here," I said. "The soda, the air, it's everywhere. Drives a kid crazy, especially when he's gotta read all this crap."
    "Which brings me to my final point of these documents," said Mom. "You and Jake are the most important things in the world to me –"
    "We're things?" said Jake.
    "– and I want to express that to you by leaving you all my money. All of it."
    "But aren't we poor?" said Jake. "Wouldn't that be an nigh-empty promise of payment? Are you not in fact deep in debt via mortgage, student loan, credit card, graft et cetera? Are you not a lousy mother after all and shouldn't we go home and leave this paper here with the rest of our garbage?"
    "Hear Mom out, you ungrateful garbage," I said.
    "Yes, hear me out, boys," said Mom. "You have always thought of me as a poor clerk at the local department store who earned her daily bread –"
    "I'm sick of bread," said Jake. "All we eat is bread. Wheat, white, rye, sourdough –"
    "– folding towels and taking lip from belligerent hausfraus. But there's something I've never told you: It was all a lie. The truth is that I'm the queen of a faraway long-forgotten country –"
    "Atlantis?" said Jake.
    "– and I would be killed if they ever caught me."
    "Gosh, why, Mom?" I said. "Didn't your country love their queen?"
    "They sure did," she said. "But love only goes so far before a greedy prime minister uses his wiliness and influence to confuse people and have them turn against that which they love."
    "Are you talking about yourself?" said Jake.
    "Yes, because queens are allowed to do that," said Mom.
    "So if you weren't a queen you wouldn't be able to do that," said Jake.
    "I've had enough of this boy's insolence, your majesty," I said. "I say we hang him."
    "Do something. Something." Mom looked at Jake with disregard.
    "Will doing so make me the sole heir to the nonexistent but pleasant sounding empire you have delineated in my imagination?" I said.
    "Prossibly," said Mom.
    "Then consider it done," I said. "I have no brother."
    "Yes, kill your brother," she said.
    "I just told you, I have no brother," I said.
    I grabbed a broomstick from a passing drone and jabbed it into my brother's Adam's apple. I only had to press a little harder (he had a weak neck) and death would be his reward. But I stopped myself. I couldn't do it.
    "Do it," said Mom. "I command you."
    "I – I can't," I said.
    "Thank God," said Jake, breathing a sigh.
    Jake and I walked out of the restaurant. We left Mom inside with her inheritance papers and a hamburger.
    "All right, I need to know what just happened in there," said Jake.
    "I saved your life," I said. "I remembered reading a few days back in an obscure journal I subscribe to that a rare form of mind-controlling hypnotic bacteria has been propagating at certain McDonald's restaurants coincidentally located in our very neighborhood. When this fact hit me and I examined Mom's suddenly influential behavior and my rapid hatred to you, I knew that something was afoot."
    "Yet you overcame her influence," said Jake.
    "I am special," I said. "I tan easily. I can read a book in under a week. I have all the colors in a box of Crayola crayons memorized alphabetically. I have many