The Misadventures of Cry Baby

As Momma's Sipping from a Sippy Cup

"She watches Momma sip a drink

Out of a sippy cup that is pink

Because of that you'd never think

That she'd be passed out under the sink"

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  Cry Baby laid in the darkness as she tossed and turned under her heated sheets. It was very late, she knew, but it was almost difficult for her to fall asleep without being lulled by the usual moans and groans that seemed to play out through the entire house nearly every night.

  However, the restless Cry Baby didn't have to wait long to get her kind of lullaby. She almost immediately recognized the familiar rumble of a car pulling up to her home. Who had Daddy brought over tonight?

  Curiosity quickly got the best of her as Cry Baby flung her blankets to the side and leaped from the edge of the bed. THUMP. 'And she sticks the landing!' Cry Baby silently narrated in third person. Muscle memory now had Cry Baby dropped to her knees on the bedside, and she was soon sprawled out beneath her mattress. She was reaching for the binoculars underneath.

  As she pulled the field glasses to her chest, the crunching of gravel being driven upon had all but diminished. Cry Baby briskly stood to creep to the windowsill and by that time her father's expensive sports car appeared fully parked. She grinned and quietly congratulated herself: "New record."

  Cry Baby put the binoculars to her eyes, and forgot she had to blink so many times to adjust them to look at the close-up surroundings. Then, as the world came into focus, she wasn't at all surprised at what she saw. From the headlights glow, Cry Baby could tell the woman her father had taken home tonight was Beth Anne's mother, 'It was only a matter of time until he seduced her,' whose family had came over just a couple of days before. Cry Baby frowned as she recalled the memory. 

  But Cry Baby went back to her spying shortly and had to suppress a laugh as she focused on the woman. Not having all the details of what she'd really looked like before, because 'Don't stare at her,' her mother had said when the neighbors came over, 'it's disrespectful!' Cry Baby could see now that the cheating woman was wearing at least three pounds of make-up and had what was definitely an ass of silicone. 'She looks like a Whore Island Barbie with all that plastic,' Cry Baby mentally joked.

   She didn't notice the lacy curtain to the living room window jerk to a close at the same time that all her attention fell on watching the obviously drunken couple stumble toward the front door. But that quickly became enough espy for Cry Baby for the night. She had to remind herself that this was not a movie for her to watch, this was real life and not a form of entertainment. It was an invasion of privacy to these people she spied on, and these affairs that played out in front of her were sins, the same sins that had resulted in her mother's alcoholism and her brother's drug addiction.

  Cry Baby sighed and inched away from the casement without a sound. After pitching the binoculars back under her bedstead, the young girl slipped back under the now inviting covers that were her bedclothes. Cry Baby wanted to concentrate only on how the mattress was so soft and cradled her little weight well, and how cozy it was to be burrowed underneath so many blankets, and how the kept woman would be gone tomorrow morning, or at least out of this house. She turned her back on the window and snuggled up under her comfortable quilt.

  Cry Baby then closed her heavy lids and tried to dream about having a life with a perfect family..

  She automatically sat up with eyes wide and searching the darkness as she heard an ear-piercing scream sound from the downstairs area, the room right underneath her own, Cry Baby believed. The kitchen.

  'That's strange,' she thought, brows causing crinkling. 'Normally I hear the yells coming from the bedroom, and I can sleep through them. Daddy must have not wanted to wait..?' She did assume the deafeningly high-pitched, whiny and nasally howl that had startled her belonged to Beth Anne's mom, which supported this theory. But how impatient had her father been? Cry Baby squinted at her wall clock.

  It had only been about a half-hour since she had snooped on her father and his mistress.

  The puzzled Cry Baby sat hunched on the bed with her head in her hands. It surely wasn't late enough for the mistress to be screaming at such a high volume already. Something bigger was going down in the cookery.