A high pitched scream fills the boat, emanating from the salon. I leap out of the starboard bow where I am looking for a replacement bulb for the deck light and grab the advanced medical kit en route. A scream like that must mean a major knife cut. “What is it!? Who is it?!”
A gasp of horror and a huge indrawn breath from Jaime as I enter the salon, “OH MY GOD Mom, it MOVED.” She is standing at the table staring aghast at a bin of flour.
I draw a blank, “It moved.”
“The flour. It MOVED. Oh my god... LOOK it's moving again!!!” Mera and Aeron peer at the open container.
Aeron notes calmly, “She's right. It moves.” Why look at that. She pokes the powder with a testing finger and watches the entire mass roil slightly. “Cool.”
Mera doesn't think it's cool. Mera is a bit disgusted, “Eeew. What is wrong with it?”
“What is wrong with it? What is WRONG with it?! It's alive, that's what's WRONG with it!” Jaime shouts.
Okay, no blood, no band-aid. I put down the med kit and join the girls to stare at the teeming mass of bugs in our erstwhile dinner rolls. Apparently, we are not going to be having garlic bread with dinner this evening. I attempt to placate my eldest, “It's not really that bad. Just a bit of extra protein.”
She shoots me a classic teenage look of disgust and contempt. I'm worse than the flour. “No way. No -way- I am eating anything made with that.”
The gauntlet now thrown, I am tempted to get to work making yeast bread. However, when I pick up the container, a good dozen black moving creatures rise to the top and giggle at me. I swear I hear little chitters and snickers. I swallow both my pride and my gorge and admit, “Okay, you're probably right. There's not much we can do with this.”
Aeron looks disappointed, “Can I keep em?”
Jaime steps up, all officialdom, “No. You may not Keep M. Those are bugs. We do not want bugs on the boat.”
It's true. We don't want bugs on the boat. Bugs on the boat are a very Bad Thing. There are two basic kind of bugs you really do not want on a boat: weevils in the flour and roaches on the floor. Of the two, however, weevils are the easier problem to solve. “I have to agree with your sister, Aeron. We don't want weevils on the boat. You can throw them overboard.”
Mera asks, “Do they float?”
“More to the point, do they swim!?” Aeron is delighted with her new project. The flour bin gets swooped up, and my spawn are off to the transom where they throw flour and weevils around for 15 minutes testing such important scientific questions as: Do weevils fly? Why does flour float? Why do weevils sink? Why does flour clump in the salt water? What happens when you throw the flour upwind? and Just how much flour can we get on the boat before Mom's head explodes?
Glad someone is having fun. DrC says he saw a roach last night. All I can say is that he'd better be wrong, or we're going to need that medical kit after all. I'm going to have to kill myself.
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