Daniel tries another prank …
“Michael, where is your brother?”
Michael had three brothers, but when his mother asked in that tone …it was his twin, Daniel, of course.
Daniel wasn’t a bad kid, he just didn’t see things quite like other people. If he was told to do something, he was likely to think there was a better way to do it, and to try it out without asking. Usually there was not a better way, and he just ended up making a mess. Even when there was, as when he’d put together a new pulley system to get hay into the upper barn, he was so clumsy that he’d make a mess of that too. In the case of the pulley system, it worked well and they still used it, but when Daniel first tried to demonstrate it, Michael had to run for their father to untangle him before he strangled.
And then, of course, there were the pranks. Daniel meant no harm, but he was, shall we say, emotionally clumsy as well as physically clumsy and so they often weren’t funny to anyone other than him.
“What’s he done now?”
“He told Lily about ‘Uncle Ernie who lives in the ceiling and eats eggs.’ And then he sent her to me with an eggshell that he’d blown out so that she could throw it at the ceiling while I tried to stop her.”
“Well, I guess, it was just an eggshell then …?”
“Yes,” she answered grimly. “It was. And then Lily with her three-year-old mind thought this was so hilarious that she swiped four more eggs and threw them at the ceiling too. And I am not cleaning those eggs off the ceiling! Now where is your brother?”
“He, um, he went down to the creek to look for, um, frogs …”
“Then you go fetch him. And you tell him that if I find one frog in my house, he’ll be sleeping in the barn until he’s forty!”