As it so happened, Geraldine was not, in fact, dead. Not completely, at least – though her skin did have a certain pallor. But she’d modeled that particular hue directly from the womb; having no ability to swap it out for something more stylish. Yeah, it made her the target of nearly endless derision on the playground. Though in all fairness, the playground was unkind to most children at one point or another. Childhood itself was unkind to most children. 

At one point or another. 

But it had been a long time since Geraldine had been a child. Known now as Geri to her friends and enemies alike, she’d screamed into adulthood like a banshee who’d broken through heavy iron tethers out of sheer force. From that point forward, she was not one to suffer fools and she took no prisoners. 

Even so, with her copper halo of wild hair and sparkling eyes the color of melted ice, she could, on certain occasions, easily pass for a playful sprite. The less observant among her deemed this as hypocritical. But who the hell were they to pass judgment? After all, isn’t everyone a bit of a paradox? Even Tinkerbell was something of a firebrand. 

“Whatcha doin’?” asked Ollie, standing over her and staring at Geri’s sweat-drenched body splayed out on the grass. 

How long have I been in this cursed sun, she wondered, a little bewildered. Her skin – that crepey wafer-thin wrap that still somehow held her body together – was stinging. When she initially positioned herself on the grass earlier, she’d scoped out a shady spot. The sun is the worst kind of invasive species, she thought. 

“Well, isn’t it obvious?” she finally responded to Ollie without changing her position, despite the sun’s searing effect on her skin. 

Ollie shrugged.

“I was talking to a family of spiders, of course.” 

“Ooooooh,” Ollie kneeled next to her. He looked directly into her cold grey eyes with his that were a warmer shade of hazel-green. He cocked a crooked smile. She couldn’t tell if he believed her or was playing along. It didn’t matter either way.

“I brought you a present,” he said, handing her a small parcel wrapped in shiny red paper that he’d pulled from his pants pocket. 

“A present?”

He nodded.

“Well,” she began, pulling herself up to a seat, “it’s not my birthday, you know.”

Ollie nodded again. “Mama says that presents aren’t just for birthdays.”

“Does she?”

“Yep.”

“I see,” Geri smiled and took in a deep breath. “Your mother is very wise,” This was, however, a bold-faced lie. Geri felt that Ollie’s mother was a bimbo. (Did anyone even use that term anymore? Bimbo?) But she also felt no need to burst those shiny iridescent illusion bubbles that fueled his little boy brain. Those bubbles would explode soon enough and she would NOT be held responsible for any part of that travesty. And she most certainly didn’t want to be there to witness it firsthand. The odds of that were slim though; given her growing intimacy with the monitor in her hospital room each time she landed there; spewing out her vitals in a not-so-melodious cascade of beeps. She’d faced the proverbial music more than a few times in the past three months.

“Are you going to open it?” Ollie asked impatiently.   

She was jolted by a fleeting remembrance of how time worked for a five-year-old. The way one minute could stretch out indefinitely, an hour felt like an eternity. What a strange thing is time.

“I am,” she confirmed, gently grazing the dewy softness of his smooth cheeks with the back of her hand. She could almost smell and taste his newness – all cream and caramel with a hint of vanilla.

Geri slowly unwrapped the package. The leisureliness was not an attempt to test Ollie’s patience but rather a necessity because of her arthritic hands. Ollie’s impatience was merely a bonus. As she peeled back the final layer, she found three perfectly stacked animal crackers. 

“Well, well,” she began. “What do we have here?”

“Animal crackers,” Ollie said with proud authority. “A horse, a cat, and then… another one.”

“Another one?”

He nodded sheepishly, looking up at the sky for a moment.

“And what, pray tell, is the other one?” she asked with the most serious tone she could conjure. She held up one single animal cracker with no defined shape. “What kind of animal, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” Ollie shrugged, looking past the strange cookie. “I mean, I don’t remember.”

Geri cocked a brow. “You don’t remember?”

“I bit off all the arms and legs and head now I don’t know what it is.” 

She couldn’t help but let out a guffaw. “Let me get this straight! You gave me a half-eaten animal cracker!?”

“I gave you two whole ones,” he quickly reminded her.

“That’s true,” she nodded, impressed with his comeback. “You did. And it’s important to pay attention to the positive,” she said more for her benefit than his. 

“I think it was a spider,” Ollie suddenly said. 

“A spider?”

“The other animal cracker. I think it was a spider before I bit off all its arms and legs and head.”

“Ahhhh,” Geri pondered. “You mean like the spiders I was talking with earlier.”

“Yes. But no. Because I wouldn’t bite off their arms and legs.”

Geri frowned. “That wouldn’t be very nice.”

Ollie shook his head vigorously.

“It makes perfect sense that it could have been a spider,” she said, not pointing out that for the cookie to have been a spider, he’d have had to bite off eight arms and legs and the only animal crackers she’d ever seen had only ever had four. It was this brand of highly sensible nonsense that rented so much space in the adult mind. She was so tired of it.

“Let me see it,” Ollie reached over to grab the amorphous cookie, but Geri pulled it closer to her chest. 

“Mine!” she exclaimed like a belligerent child. 

Ollie broke into laughter, which made her laugh as well. It tickled her how a child could find such delight in adults acting like children. It was as if the adult had unwittingly entered their exclusive club of childhood innocence with a special day pass. And as she listened to Ollie’s continuing laughter, she imagined there wasn’t any price she wouldn’t pay for such a pass.