sink or swim || joaquín & kala
@joaquinpacana
There wasn’t enough cotton candy in the world to keep seven-year-old Henry away from the lighthouse tours. Kala learned this because that’s exactly what they were in line for when her son overheard the tour guide announcing that the next group was about to go in and bolted off towards them. He wasn’t normally the type of kid to run off without warning, but give him enough sugar and the promise of something exciting, and his legs had a tendency of taking him places before Kala could give the OK.
She followed after him, though, and spent an extra five minutes after the tour was over waiting for her son to finish marveling at the sight of the Maine horizon from the staircase window. The sun would begin its descent soon, and she didn’t want to keep the tour guide waiting to close up. Henry protested (”But mom, did you even look at the sky?”) at first, but fell into a fit of giggles when Kala hoisted him over her shoulder and carried him outside, setting him back down on the grass and ushering him off to their neighbor, who had agreed to play babysitter for a while.
Once Henry reached his destination, Kala’s hands found her hips and she became aware of another body standing beside her. She thought she recognized the man, but that was what she thought about most people; surely she had seen everyone attending the picnic somewhere before-- at the grocery store, picking up their kids from school, during an early-morning coffee run. What she knew for sure, however, was that the man had just witnessed her carrying a very hyper child over her shoulder like a sack of flour.
“I swear I’m not one of those moms who go on about being all organic and never letting their child have sugar,” she prompted in that polite, small-talk-with-strangers lilt. “But after tonight... my child might never have sugar again. As you have just witnessed, it has some interesting side-effects.”