Doing the Dishes

Theme: Family / Growing Up

Writer: Sinead Curran

Approximate Age Group: 10 – 14 years

My sister Laura was standing at the top of the hill and my cousin Mathew and I were at the bottom. “Laura, you have to run down as fast as you can, it’s the best fun ever” I shouted up at her. As she prepared to take off at full speed sown the hill towards us in her brand new, ultra-fashionable skinny jeans, that I had just bought that week, I did have a moment where I thought that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. The moment passed and Laura started down the hill as fast as she could. At first her face was filled with joy and as her feet moved faster and faster, she looked as though she was indeed having the best fun ever. As she came towards the bottom of the hill, her expression changed to fear as she saw what myself and Mathew, now smirking, were standing in. she tried to stop but her legs were now moving completely  by themselves. Before she knew it, Laura and her brand new skinny jeans were, covered in brown, wet, mud. Mathew and I laughed. Laura didn’t.

We weren’t very nice to each other in our younger years. She hated me. She had good reason too. For three blissful years, Laura had happily existed as the youngest member of our family. Then I came along and had the nerve to be born. Straight away, her life was ruined. I stole her house, her family, half her bedroom and for one very sleepless winter, half of her bed. She didn’t just roll over and take it. She made her dissatisfaction with the situation very clear. She drew an invisible line down the center of the room and threatened me with death if I were to even think of crossing it. I stayed on my side with my filthy mess for as long as I could. Of course, this was impossible as the door was on her side of the line.

It was a constant worry to my mother that we fought too much. We spent our days shouting and punching each other and trying to make each other suffer as much as possible. Of course out biggest fight was to be our last. Laura had just gotten her braces removed and she was strutting around the house smiling and licking her teeth, cruelly rubbing it in my face that her teeth were straight and mine stuck out. I was a little jealous, I suppose. That night my mother went out and left the two of us to do the dishes. I hated doing the dishes. I couldn’t see the point of cleaning them if they were just going to get dirty again. There was always so many dished to do too. It was as if my mother would intentionally dirty every single dish in the house just so that we would have to slave over them for hours. We got started on the dishes. For a change, I got to wash and Laura was drying. At first we were getting along just fine but then Laura started to say things just to annoy me. I don’t remember exactly what she was saying. She was probably going on about her teeth and how great they were and how mine would have been straight if I hadn’t sucked my thumb. I tried to ignore it but she kept going on about it, laughing and mocking and she dried the large black frying pan. I was getting angry now but I kept my cool until she bashed the frying pan off my shoulder. “Ouch!” I screamed as I turned around and smacked the frying pan upwards towards her face. I thought she had a tighter grip on the handle but I was wrong. The heavy, metal pan banged straight into her mouth. We looked at each other for in silence for about half a second as she stared at me, covering her mouth with her hand.  Her eyes widened and she let out the loudest, most high pitched scream I had ever heard. She took down her hand, still screaming, and there was blood coming out of her mouth onto her hand.

I stood there looking at her, wondering why she was screaming so hysterically as if someone had stabbed her when I all I had done was burst her lip or something. “My tooth! My tooth!” she screamed in between her high pitched squeals. I looked down in her hand where she was little bits of white glistened in the pool of blood. Realizing that I had just maimed my sister, I decided that the only way to cope with the situation was to become just as hysterical as her. With her screaming and me crying, I ran after her trying to fix her tooth. “Put it in milk! Put it in milk!” I had seen an episode of ‘999 Rescue’ on the television where a girl got her tooth knocked out and she put her tooth in milk and then back in her mouth and it somehow reattached itself to her gum. Of course this wasn’t going to work as i hadn’t knocked her tooth out but rather smashed it into little pieces of which she was now in her hand while running up and down the kitchen. We ran around the kitchen for a while, her screaming and me crying “I’m sorry” until my mother burst in, convinced one of us was on fire. She managed to calm Laura down eventually and after a few hours was able to pry the little pieces of tooth from her hand and into the bin. I was convinced at this point that my life was over. I would forever be known as the girl who turned her sister into a toothless freak. I would be thrown out of school and be forced to stay inside for the rest of my life, forever ashamed of what I had done. I rocked back and forth on the stairs where I received a brief lecture from my mother on the terrible consequences of fighting. I wished she had given me this lecture before I had attacked my sister with a frying pan and ruined her chances of ever having a happy life.

Naturally, Laura didn’t talk to me for a few days. I went to the shop and bought her a magnum ice cream and a packet of crisps as an apology. She knew I was genuinely sorry because magnums were really expensive. She started talking to me and after a couple of trips to the dentist, she looked fine. We never really fought after that. More importantly however, I never had to do the dishes again.