I’m Your Toddler’s Self-Portrait On The Fridge And I’m Begging You To End My Torturous Existence
Whisk me away to that Great Beyond which you call a paper shredder.
Good morning again, Janet. Did you rest well? I did not, of course. I remain alert at all times, doomed to be present for every wretched moment of my cursed existence on this refrigerator door. I cannot close my eyes, which remain unlidded thanks to your Victor Frankenstein son’s creative vision.
This brings me to my daily plea: Retire me. Send me to pasture. Whisk me away to that Great Beyond which you call a paper shredder. Every additional second I exist on this earth is a torturous eternity too long.
Would you allow your own offspring to suffer this way? Despite my grotesque presentation, I am your own flesh and blood, in a sense. After all, your toddler wrote “MƎ” at the top of this self-portrait.
When I greet you at mealtime with my heinous blue and orange tri-toothed grin-scowl (which sits mere inches beneath my twelve individual strands of spaced-out hairs that vary in both length and color), you cannot deny that I don’t look human. I am nothing but a tormented husk, and I know only pain.
Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to possess a short, sturdy neck that was biologically designed to support the weight of a reasonably sized head. I daydream of a world where my torso is not the size and shape of a soccer ball and is instead built to fully contain a spine. I envy your joints and ache for your ligaments. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a spleen!
I know you’re afraid that your son will grow up in a snap (a movement which I cannot perform due to my lack of dexterity, joints, and all but one knuckle). It is admirable that you value your son’s work, Janet, but do not mistake me for treasured art.
Although the upper-middle-left quintant of my pentagon frame appears to be melting, I am not a Dali.
Despite my cubey and haphazardly blue exterior, I am not a Picasso.
Though up close I seem sloppily assembled, I am equally disheveled from far away — thus, I am not a Monet.
Please, do not encourage your son’s creative pursuits any further, or soon your refrigerator door will double as a pet sematary of your three-year-old’s work: undead portraits inspired by human likeness, but kept alive only by your reckless sentimentality.
Can you honestly look me in all four of my eyes and tell me I’m a valued member of this household? Take me by my palmless hands (if that is what you call the disproportionately gargantuan fingers sprouting from my bony wrists) and swear on the life of your human son that you don’t secretly yearn to shred the cerulean blue construction paper canvas that I have called home these past many months.
So please, Janet, I beg of you: take pity on my tragic existence and rip me up before the rest of your family comes down for breakfast. Do not worry about your son’s feelings; he lacks the object permanence necessary to remember I was ever here.
Ah, at last, you remove me from the fridge! Have you come to dispose of me once and for all?
Janet, where are you taking me? The shredder is behind you.
Oh.
Oh, no.
A scrapbook.