Enter the Navel Squid

“Do you want to see what my navel can do?”  We’re in the grocery store.  Rissa is in full-on lunatic mode. She has been tying bunny ears on all the bags of our vegetables.  You know… so they’ll be securely closed and it’ll look like we have an entire cart full of transparent rabbits.  (I really shouldn’t be surprised. I think it’s genetic.  My father used to race down the aisles of grocery stores with the shopping cart, much to my mother’s embarrassment.)

Apparently, Rissa’s navel can climb buildings.

“What… it pops off your body, and all on its own…?”

“No!  Noooooo!  It has a Navel Squid, that can come out and use its suction cups you know, ON things.”

“I think I need an example.”

“Like this.”  Rissa’s lifts up her shirt to expose her belly button and then she violently assaults my side with her stomach, making a sucking noise deep in her throat.

“It can also push shopping carts…” She detaches from my side and ‘sucks’ onto the handle of the shopping cart, pushing it forward with her abdomen, a low squelching noise accompanying her movement.

On the way home, her navel squid was singing to me – an extended version of her usual navel trumpet voluntary...

Later… at bedtime.

She is doing the a capella version of Broadway Here I Come from the second Season of Smash (the best and worst in T.V.), desperately trying to figure out the percussive accompaniment at the foot of her bed. She is clapping and snapping and stomping her feet.  She should have been in bed at least 15 minutes ago.

“You need to get into bed.  It is bed time now.  Go to sleep.”

Dejectedly, she climbs into her bed.  I make to turn the light off.

“Wait!  Wait!  I need to just… please may I just have one tiny spaz out?  Just a little one.  Like for 18 seconds or so?”

“Fine.  You may spaz out for 18 seconds.”

She does her best Linda Blair impersonation for 18 seconds, then lies panting.

“You done?”

“International solvent!!”

“What?“

“International solvent in my nose to calm me down when I’m like this at bedtime!!  I’d be all like… (she moves her head frenetically to and fro…) WHOA… HEY!  WHOA… (She then mimes having something sprayed up her nose, her eyes roll back, her head falls to the side and she lets out a deep throaty snore.)  “See?  Like that.”

“International solvent?  Do you know what a solvent* is?”

“Yeah, it’s like in nose drops or eye drops.”

“Saline solution?  Is that what you think you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Cause a solvent is generally something used to dissolve things, like to dissolve paint.”

“Don’t put that in my nose!”  She is grasping my hands in hers, now panicked.

“I wasn’t going to!”

“You can’t put that in my nose!  What if my brain got all…”

“You have to stop talking.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to try.”

“This towel is all wet from my hair, I’m going to die of hypothermia.”

“You are not going to die of hypothermia…”

“What if the hypothermia…”

My words, now muffled, because I have buried my own head in the towel-covered pillow beside her, “Why won’t you stop talking?”

“Because I love you?”

“I love you too.  Now stop talking.”

*I had to look it up.  She was right.

sol·vent  (slvnt, sôl-)

A solvent could totally be used to dissolve her insanity at bedtime.  It’s like she’s some sort of dada-esque savant.