April 8th: An Oops Tiger
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Snapshot Saturday – What? – Image Prompt
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"I think we should let the kids paint their rooms," Spencer said one day, and Emily paused in the act of brushing her hair and turned to examine her husband, looking for visible signs that he'd taken complete leave of his senses. Spencer, busy knotting his tie at a perfectly crooked angle, didn't seem to notice. "That would be fun, wouldn't it? I think they'd like that. I wanted to paint my room when I was a kid, but I didn't have the means to do so."
"So did I, I wasn't allowed," Emily replied, and resisted adding, 'for damn good reasons'. She put the brush down, perched on the side of the dresser, and thought of Olivia. Olivia, who'd recently turned eleven and requested for her birthday: a raven, a pixie cut, and for her name to be legally changed to 'Edgar, and please don't call me Livy anymore, that's my baby name'. "Are we going to need to discuss this?"
They'd found that with the more 'subjective' parenting choices, sometimes it was best left to one parent or the other to decide. That was how Spencer had won the 'Alyssa gets a chemistry set at the age of four' while Emily had triumphed in the 'no, the children don't need a dog to experiment on, they have each other'.
Spencer looked wistful. "No," he said, and she saw his shoulders slump a little. Damnit. Man had already been happily dreaming up a blissful afternoon discussing colour schemes with his madcap children. Did he not actually know the people they'd created? "It's okay. It was just an idea."
Emily thought of Olivia again, and how she'd taken to writing Nevermore, quoth my goth life over the front of all her school workbooks, and then she looked again at Spencer's sadly angled shoulders.
Fuck.
"This one is on you," she warned him, rolling her eyes as he whooped and dashed off to tell the children. Nauseous and blaming her trepidation about what their poor house was about to undergo, she sat down on the bed and waited for the anarchy.
Olivia, as expected, immediately demanded, "Black. To match my soul." Emily winced and remembered being eleven with a shudder. Olivia's recent colour scheme consisted of black, deep purples, silvers, and sapphire blue. It was actually rather pleasing, when she went easy on the black, but Emily had drawn the line at purple lipstick.
"Black rooms have negative psychological impact," Spencer rebutted immediately without skipping a beat, in-between assuring Cary and Lys that they could halve their room and paint their sides how they wished, and reassuring Tristan that, "Yes you are creative, and no I won't make you paint something if you don't want to, and yes, we will help you if you're unsure."
Emily, despite having witnessed Spencer parenting for the last eleven years, was still impressed and a little turned on by how damn good he was at it. And she felt a little bad for doubting him.
She was also planning on turning the kids out for the afternoon to show him just how proud.
"Stifling my creativity will have lifelong effects on my self-efficacy," Olivia responded pertly. "But I'll fold. Purple, with brown borders. But I get to paint the door black. And I'm putting up crime scene photos."
"Purple is considered a creative colour," Tristan offered, before hurriedly adding, "But I don't want purple, no thanks."
"Fine, purple, and no real crime scenes, replications only," Spencer agreed, and it was done.
"Right, you lot, out and Olivia, you help the kids pick their colours," Emily demanded, clapping her hands to chase the lot of them to the front door in a wave of scarves and bobble hats and booted feet. "Have fun, good luck."
The front door banged shut. "Um," said Spencer, right before she grabbed him by his tie and hauled him upstairs, earning a startled, "Oh!" as he realized what was happening.
Sometimes he was smart about things.
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The bedrooms were painted. Olivia's turned out almost okay, although it was still gloomy. Emily looked at her pleased-as-punch daughter with her spiky hair and the budgie—Edgar—Emily had conceded to in lieu of the raven sitting on her shoulder, as they shifted her furniture back into her now dry bedroom, and sighed as she thought of the years to come.
Tristan's room was next. Cary, the artist of the family, and Spencer, the validator of all crazy schemes, had sequestered themselves in the bedroom with him for hours before deciding that what they were planning was 'secret'.
What they were planning, Emily found, was wonderful.
"Oh," she said, leaning on the doorframe and staring at the half-coated wall. Not painted at all. They were wallpapering it, using wallpaper Spencer and Cary had designed, covered in pages and pages of all the novels and tales they'd read together over the years. Emily could even see some of her favourites among the tiny text, creating a pleasing pattern when one stepped far enough away that the words were obscured. "This is lovely, Tris."
Her boy beamed shyly, seemingly unaware that Cary had taken the chance to stick some wallpaper to his back while he was distracted. Or maybe he was aware, and was hoping that the wallpaper would allow him to hide in his bedroom more effectively.
Alyssa announced that she 'didn't care' what colour they painted her room, and eventually allowed Cary to claim rights over the whole thing. Emily warily made a mental note to find out how much that had cost Alyssa before they had another phone call home from the school to tell them that 'your daughters have been swapping places again, we think'.
Cary chose whiteboard paint, and Spencer was gleeful. The room was duly painted, they were given the pens to use on them, and the parents stepped back to see what they came up with. Alyssa, unsurprisingly, covered hers with complicated chemical equations and one small section devoted to drawing unicorns.
Cary drew a vicious tiger diving into a pool, great lips curled back to reveal dangerous fangs. It was huge. It was intimidating. It was impressive as fuck.
"That's… exciting," said Emily, leaning against Spencer's chest as they peered up at the huge mural taking up the entirety of one wall. "Um. Why?"
"It's Tiger," Cary explained dreamily, clearly off in another daydream. The girl spent more time in her head than out of it. "She's swimming right now, but she'll be out soon. When she gets sick of it. She's fierce."
"Interesting," murmured Spencer, wrapping his arms around Emily's belly and leaning his chin on her shoulder. "And what is Tiger, besides an actual tiger? Is she symbolic of something?"
"Don't psychoanalyse the children, Spencer," Emily scolded softly.
Cary just smiled, and pointed to Emily. Emily blinked.
As one, her, Spencer, and Alyssa all looked at her stomach.
"Oh no, not another one," Lys groaned, tugging a pillow over her face and screaming into it. "Mom, honestly."
"Uh," said Spencer, his heart galloping once with shock against Emily's back. "Honey, that's not possible. Daddy had a surgery to make sure that couldn't happen."
Cary just smiled more. "Like Tiger cares about that," she said, tossing her hair back. "Science isn't everything, Daddy."
A week later, Emily and Spencer stepped out of the doctor's clinic and walked silently to the car.
"I'm almost fifty." Emily felt wobbly, pole-axed. So much could go wrong. So much. "You had a vasectomy. What are the fucking chances?"
"One in four-thousand," answered Spencer promptly, of course, while glancing down suspiciously at his crotch as though suddenly assured of his dick's magical properties. Emily looked too, just in case. Maybe he was onto something. "Age is something we need to consider moving forward, but you had the triplets at forty… and they're healthy and developing well over average for their age." He was still staring at his crotch, and almost tumbled into a pothole as a result. They went quiet, both deep in their own thoughts.
"What's five when we already have four?" Emily said eventually, breaking the silence. "How much more broken can we possibly get?"
"I don't think the sunk cost fallacy applies to number of children," Spencer rebutted, finally looking away from his Magic Dick, as Emily had now decided it would be titled. Privately. "No one is going to believe us about this, are they?"
No one did, but six months later, Tiger showed up anyway. Early.
And she was nowhere near as fierce as advertised.
