Brother Versus Seaweed

Brother Versus Seaweed

My little brother doesn’t listen to rules.
One time, he brought a snack in the car:
A massive Costco box of seaweed,
Sprinkled with salt, wrapped in plastic,
So much seaweed that it couldn’t have come from
any other store.
It has always been my brother’s favorite kind of snack.
But shiny and slippery, that plastic was his nemesis;
The gray car seat was his battlefield.
From my viewpoint at the back of my family’s
2007 Honda Odyssey
I watched him fight with that packaging.
It was a great battle, fought by a fierce warrior.
He couldn’t have been more than 7, maybe 8.
Struggling to tear open the plastic folds,
His eyes sparkling with expectation,
His fuzzy eyebrows furrowed in concentration.
Poof! The shiny silver plastic tore.
The crinkly box inside flew out
And the oily, salty seaweed
exploded across the ground,
Like a stack of paper tossed from a window
Or confetti during New Year’s.
The scent of salt and oil wafted through the car.
His big eyes widened,
His little boy face
with its round cheeks and soft nose
Was the epitome of shock and betrayal.
A loss for the warrior, a win for the enemy
I could see the indignation pouring from his eyes
The slippery, shiny, silvery package reflected in his pupils
And when I told him not to eat the seaweed -
The five second rule is a lie;
Clearly it would make him sick.
He did exactly that.
Because my little brother does what he wants.
Because he is sunlight, brilliantly bright and burning.
Because he is the light of a star
fizzing in its flight towards Earth,
four years ahead of the darkness.
Moving towards things at the speed of
Three times ten to the eighth meters per second,
flying so fast he leaves his logic behind.
So even though the next day
he came down with a nasty stomach bug,
He prepared his sword
and remembered his armor
and returned to battle,
Ready to take on another shiny silver seaweed package
And all the ones to follow.