Roger Hunt
The Ambusher

In the living room was a couch wide enough to seat three adults, and a television atop a sturdy entertainment center. While the eight-month-old slept and the ladies were out shopping, the father and I were sitting on the couch, watching a football game on the TV and enjoying our locally-brewed microbeers. His three-year-old girl occupied herself making a fort out of the furniture we weren’t using: a coffee table, a swiveling, circular, thickly cushioned chair from Pier 1 Imports, whose bamboo frame criss-crossed in a lattice of one-by-one-foot squares; pillows and knitted throws; and the toys and books in plentiful supply.

She’d managed to up-end the top portion of the swivel chair—the cup containing the cushion, which sat upon but was not attached to the base—and balance its edges on the coffee table and a toy cook’s stool borrowed from the play kitchen set-up. The base of the swivel chair was abandoned to the side, away from the action. She managed with some effort to drape a blanket over the elevated shell, creating a cavern of sorts. She then began to announce with a joyful tone of caution that there was a monster in the cave.

She asked her father what to do. He told her she should scare the monster so that it would go away. Seeing the good sense of this, she stuck her head through the blanket curtain and raaaaaared. This seemed to do the trick, and she crawled enthusiastically into the evacuated lair. Her pleasure was short-lived, however; after a minute or so of sitting in her captured redoubt, she bumped the stool, and the bamboo-chair-cave-roof collapsed. Unhurt but irritated, she called her father for rescue. He, in a well-meaning attempt to save the day, reconstituted the walls and ceiling. But he neglected the blanket skin, and the cave simulation was imperfect.

His daughter prefered for the blanket to be replaced. She tried to tug it across the chair bottom herself, but had difficulty getting it to stay; it kept slipping off and onto the ground. Her father swooped in again to help, centering the blanket where it wouldn’t slide off. She asked her father if he wanted to go into the cave with her. He was willing to oblige, but had to wonder how they would both fit. While he considered his entrance, she shrieked: the monster had returned. She asked him to scare it away. He bent over and growled into the cave. After successfully scaring the monster, the child reminded him that he was supposed to go into the cave so they could be inside together. He knelt down, then got on his hands and knees before laying himself down on the carpet. When she saw that her father’s head and upper torso were inside the boundary of the draped blanket… she yanked the blanket away!

And in the same movement she kicked the miniature stool away so the shell fell upon him, successfully entrapping half of her father in a bamboo prison cell. She then fell to the ground herself, in a fit of insidious giggling, snickering seh-seh-seh-seh over and over again.

<< Back to Issue 15, 2012