Mutiny of the Little Sweeties

Rubbing his hands, Papa walked around some more, dreaming how he would work for a bit now, and sat down at the computer. He wrote about five lines, but somehow got stuck and brewed coffee. Then he wrote two more lines, made a sandwich, and deleted about ten lines. Then he got up and began to walk again, trying to understand why he did not feel like working.

Something was wrong. But what?

Papa fed the turtle, changed the guinea pigs’ sawdust, and isolated the rat Schwartz in a free cage. In the separate cage, Schwartz was shaking the bars and squealing like a tyrant locked up in prison.

“That’s it! I will write! I will work! And you’re free, women of the East!” Papa informed Schwartz’s wives and returned to the computer. And again he did not feel like working. At first, Papa deleted individual words, then sentences, then paragraphs, and in the end almost deleted the whole storyline.

However, here he discovered that now he would be deleting the entire book and hastily stood up. Terrible shrieks reached him from the rat cage. Left without the tyranny of Schwartz, his wives were fighting among themselves and began to steal each other’s food and children. They managed to shove one of the rats’ heads between the bars and, had Papa not appeared in time, everything would have ended badly. Papa hurriedly transferred Schwartz. An enraged Schwartz instantly gave all his wives a dressing-down, took all their food, with his hind legs sent the children flying by the handful, approximately an equal number in each, and again restored the fragile family peace in the cage.

Papa began to wander through the house, collecting cups forgotten in corners. But inspiration did not come to light in the empty cups. He climbed up to the pigeons and scared them with the broom, hoping that they would take off to the infinite sky, but the pigeons had grown lazy and, barely having flown away from home, returned to the attic. Papa had to launch the broom again.

“What’s with you! You’ve Become fussy!” Papa said to the pigeons. “You’re just like people! To get you to fly, someone has to constantly bash you with a broom!”

He poured wheat for the pigeons and tried to work again, but did not even reach the laptop, feeling that it was useless. Not knowing what to do, he washed all the dishes and wrote “so?” on the fridge with a marker, putting down the date.

This was a “time bomb” – a timid attempt of today’s Papa to stretch a hand out to tomorrow’s Papa, who will already know everything. Papa had a score of such temporal beacons around the house. He was constantly throwing them at himself, when no book had come out for a long time or no new kid was born for more than two years.

Papa Gavrilov loitered this way till one in the afternoon and then he had to go for Alex. Peter appeared at two, Vicky, Kate, and Alena returned, and the house was filled with noise. Something fell and crashed, someone got into the fridge, soup was being warmed, someone grumbled, and someone clambered onto a stool looking for Kate’s stash.

Peter wandered around the house and, rewarding himself for pretending to be a decent person in school all morning, disturbed all the smartphones, tablets, and computers. He updated, changed systems, connected to and disconnected from Wi-Fi, restricted access, and added passwords. Alena and Kate groaned, because Peter had installed a program throwing them off the Internet every ten minutes and demanded for every subsequent logon something delicious from their caches.

At half past five, Papa brought Costa and Rita home from kindergarten and began to work with Costa on his left hand, because, although Mama was not home, Costa’s left hand had not disappeared anywhere. Costa repeated that he did not need his left hand, that his right was strong, and tried to run off.

“The female approach is doing everything according to plan!” Papa said. “But the male approach…”

“… is to do nothing at all!” Kate got in.

“No! The male approach is creative improvisation!” Papa contested and, proposing to Costa to play pirates and captives, tied his right hand to his body with a rope. His left hand, however, Papa, like a careless pirate, forgot to tie up. Now, in order to free himself, Costa had to untie the knot with his left hand. After panting for fifteen minutes, he managed it and was then very proud of himself.

“Here, I’ll untie any knot!” Peter said and ordered Costa and Alex to tie him up.

They tied him up, and Peter, it goes without saying, easily freed himself. Then Peter began to demand that Alena and Kate tie him up, and he also got free.

“Now you!” he said to Vicky, and Vicky tied Peter with so many small knots that he could no longer free himself and started yelling that she had tied incorrectly and only damaged the rope and made other similar criticisms.

While everyone was tying Peter up, Papa mechanically checked whether the left hands of the remaining children worked and was very surprised that they did. For example, Alex even managed to twirl a pencil like a propeller between the fingers of his left hand, because in a movie one thrower did this with knives.

Costa became bored and began to fool around. All the same, the poor guy was unaccustomed to being without Mama, who was busy making a bust of him in clay, appliqué, and many other things. Alex was walking around in a bike helmet, because Costa was hitting him on the head with a boot.

“Doesn’t hurt! Doesn’t hurt!” Alex shouted and moved the helmet, until Costa hit him on the nose. Then Alex wrested the boot from him and quickly ran off somewhere with it. The boot was only found in the freezer an hour later. It was Alex’s terrible revenge. True, he no longer remembered that he had hid it and was no less surprised than the others.

Costa continued to behave badly. He grabbed the girls’ things, put them somewhere, and would not tell where.