The Fly Button

Dear Feedstore Zealots,

I couldn't help myself. Lucy followed me into the shower and wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote her story. Once again, I have met the NPR challenge using the same 4 words (see if you can figure out what they are... duh.), referencing the same general setting, and limiting myself to exactly 600 words. This one is a bit more whimsical, but then Lucy is only 9, after all.... Did I mention today is April Fool's Day?



Lucy reached under the ruffled bedspread and pulled out her sewing kit. Inside was a large ziplock bag full of buttons. Lucy loved buttons. She had been collecting them since she was four. Her favorites were always shiny. Today she was planning on sewing her newest, a golden metallic fly with red rhinestone eyes, onto the blue sweater Poppa had brought home yesterday. Soon they were going to the corner diner for pancakes. Poppa always took her to the diner on Saturday mornings for a plate of giant pancakes and a mug of hot chocolate with whipped cream. She loved the whipped cream. The waitress always piled it high above the rim of the white mug. Lucy would watch it melt down into the brown liquid, not touching it with her spoon, just licking a little off the top as she watched. Poppa read the weekly, grunting over the columns like an angry giraffe. He made her laugh. She didn’t understand why he got so mad at the paper. It was just a stupid newspaper with a lot of stuff about politics and government. She liked the ads at the end, though. The ones with all the pretty girls telling you to call them to chat. Poppa said the ads were inappropriate, but that was just a trick of his. He liked to play tricks like that, using words like ‘inappropriate’ or ‘mature’. Sometimes he tricked her into eating things she didn’t like by using words like ‘organic’ or ‘healthy’. He only let her eat the pancakes and hot chocolate so he could grunt over the newspaper.
The blue sweater was really pretty. Poppa said he found it at the little store near his business, Planting the Seeds of Change. She thought the name was pretty funny because there weren’t any plants at all in his office, except the one plastic palm that stood by the front windows to make people think about plants. He called it ‘marketing’. She thought marketing was what you did when you went get groceries.
She pulled a spool of thread from the kit to match the blue of the sweater and drew it through a slender needle. She bent over her work and carefully attached the fly button above the embroidery. She had really been excited when she first saw the sweater. It was decorated all over with leaves and flowers from different plants, just like an Easter bouquet. She thought immediately of the fly button, thinking it would be a good trick to make it look like it was flying just above the plants. It made her laugh. She couldn’t wait.
Her Poppa didn’t even notice. She had come out of her room and twirled around and thrust her little chest out to show off her work, but he had just grunted, as usual, and headed for the door. Lucy sighed. He was so grumpy lately. On the way to the diner he said almost nothing except to watch for the mud in front of Mrs. Simpton’s lawn. She always watered at night, even when it rained, and sometimes mud flooded the sidewalk. Sometimes Lucy would stop to rescue the worms, but today Poppa was in a hurry.
They slid into their usual booth at the diner. Lucy loved the shiny red upholstery that matched the table tops. She thought it looked like a Mickey Mouse diner. That made her laugh. Poppa looked up from his paper and smiled.
“I like the sweater,” he said. “Nice button.”
Lucy grinned. The fly glittered above the plants. It had been a good trick after all.