The Cookie Jar
It's funny how some of the things we take for granted are the very things that connect us on a deeper level.
Such is my story.
Hello from the dining room table. I am the cookie jar.
And I am spectator to one of the most unconventional of families.
I was discovered in a dumpster after being discarded by my previous owners. It was not as though I could help the paint chipping off of me! As I waited for the end, I was found by what I could only describe as the largest and strangest rat I had even seen. He deemed me worthy of being put in the burlap sack slung across his back and took me to what would be my new home.
My most frequent visitor is the one named Michelangelo, partly because he is the one who ensures that I never empty. I can still recall the first time he ever attempted to cook, and the look of terror on his rat-father's face as he discovered his youngest son in the kitchen, holding aloft a butcher's cleaver. Yes, I have grown rather fond of that creature, although he tends to do more emptying me than refilling me.
The most difficult one to attract is the one in purple. It's hard enough to get him interested in food at all. Just about all day every day, he would lock himself inside that big iron cage he calls a lab, doing Lord-knows-what. He would only reappear late at night when his hunger would outweigh his need to search for the truth. But even then he would only ever take one cookie. Peculiar thing, that one.
Concerning the ones called Leonardo and Raphael, I have noticed a pattern. One would always announce when there was only one cookie left inside me and the other would rush over to lay claim over it. A fight occurs, harsh words are exchanged, and hilarity ensues. All for the sake of a single heap of still-together crumbs. A cookie jar could not be more amused.
I can remember a time when the least frequent to partake in my delights was their rat-father, Splinter. Nowadays with his sons seeking the surface and fatherly concern silently but surely gnawing at his heart, Splinter would turn to me when meditation could not sate him-me or that blasted fridge for one of those disgusting cheesicles (I still don't know how he can stomach those things, not that I've ever eaten one. I am an inanimate object, after all).
The one thing I had never expected of this family of five was it becoming a family of seven. April, the red-headed girl was the first human I had seen in half a decade. She had gone from "complete stranger" to "big sister". The mutants had accepted her, warts and all. Lord, if a cookie jar could shed tears…The one who wears the mask, though. He'd managed to rub me the wrong way after only two visits to the home. And by rubbing the wrong way, I mean almost dropping me to my death. Still, they tolerate him.
Yes. As the rat said: We became the unlikeliest of families.
Unlikeliest of families as they were, they were still a family.
Sweet as the confections I contain.
And I am a content spectator to it all.