Christmas cookies!

This week I went to the doctor’s office for a checkup after that unusual bowel movement, but all my doctor told me was that I would probably go blind if I kept calling her Snigglefritz. Rather than change my ways and thus limit my enjoyment of life, I've decided to learn Braille while I can still see.

“Does that say ‘The fish can flee the country?’” I was asking yesterday with my eyes closed while I was practicing my Braille reading at Juice’s house.

“No,” said Juice’s little sister, who was sitting on my left thigh, sandwiching me between Juice and herself on the couch. I felt and probably looked like a hot orange. “It says ‘See Spot run.’ You gotta try harder, Jolly. You’ve been reading the same sentence for four hours straight. I’ve learned the entire Braille alphabet and I’m only five!”

“Jolly, you have to feel the bumps with your fingers to read it,” said Juice. She held her happy-face mug up to the book. “Look. My mug is reading Braille. Isn’t that adorable?”

“Just great,” I said, reaching forward to grab one of Juice’s mom’s freshly-baked cookies from the Antarctica-shaped platter on the coffee table. No sooner had I taken my first bite than someone suddenly turned out the lights, or so I thought for a few moments.

“Golly, I guess I’m blind now,” I said, not quite grasping the reality of the situation. “Oh well. At least I have this booze-infested cookie.”

“Nothing makes Jolly giggle more than booze cookies,” said Juice. “Don’t tell her the recipe, Mom; it’s all mine! What is it?”

“Well, you’ll never guess what my secret is,” I heard her mom say.

“Booze?”

“Nope. No booze. I grind up these Christmas tree strings of beads and mix them in. The chemicals give people an intoxicated feeling without bad breath. Of course, there are side effects, like diarrhea, temporary blindness, and blackheads.”

“Is that why everyone in your family has a black head, Juice?” I asked, my vision already beginning to clear. “Because you eat too many of these cookies?”

“Yup. But our bodies are black because of Mom’s chocolate salad,” Juice said between bites of cookie.