Prompt: Write something that incorporates a squid, a lampshade and the smell of burning tortillas.

Another tantrum, sure enough. This one’s a doozy. The house shakes with the screaming. I pause in my dinner prep, trying to muster the intestinal fortitude necessary to ignore the assault on my ears. You know that chemical that causes the feeling of stress, the one I can’t think of right now because I’m too stressed out? Yeah, that one. I’m up to my eyeballs in it. What’s that crash from the vicinity of the living room? I run in to check. She threw her stuffed squid at the lamp and knocked it over. The lamp is fine, but the lampshade, the one that my wife found for $1.50 at Michaels and spent an hour painting dots on, is toast. The metal ring tore right out of the cheap paper shade material. I can’t wait to hear what she’s going to say about this. Not the toddler, the wife. The toddler is making her views clearly felt right now. As I wonder how the afternoon could get any worse, I realize that the new smell is that of my tortillas burning in the toaster oven.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.