The Morning I Got Up First
A child gets up at five to make breakfast in bed and wrecks the kitchen doing it — then works out that the present was never the breakfast, and finds the mess already cleaned up by somebody who is supposed to be asleep.
12 pages · hardcover 8×8" (20×20cm)
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Read the whole story
Every word, start to finish. The pictures come next — painted around your child, from one photo.
For Maeve, who was up before the birds.
Dedication
Everyone in the house was asleep. Maeve was not. Today was the day, and it started at five.
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The kitchen is bigger at five in the morning, and quieter, and full of corners. Everything worth having lived on a shelf too high, as if somebody had planned it.
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Eggs first. Maeve had watched this done a hundred times, elbow height, from the side. It had always looked simple enough. Tap, pull, done. There was clearly a trick, and clearly nobody had said what it was.
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Four eggs. Three of them landed on the floor. The fourth had shell in it, which is still an egg.
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Toast, then, and tea. Tea needed the kettle, and the kettle needed the chair, and the chair had one leg shorter than the rest and mentioned it the whole way across the kitchen.
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The smoke alarm went off at ten past six. Maeve waved a tea towel at it and said nothing at all.
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The tray got as far as the third stair. Third from the bottom, of eleven. Maeve sat down beside what was left of it and did the arithmetic of the morning: no eggs, no tea, no toast, no tray.
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Nobody had ever once asked for breakfast in bed. What got asked for, every single day, was the trash.
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So Maeve took out the trash. Then the dishes. Then every shoe in the hall, lined up like a store.
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By eight the kitchen gleamed. One slice of toast. One glass of water. Not much of a breakfast.
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The hall was clean. Every crumb of it. And on the tray, beside her slice, sat a second one, buttered, still warm.
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Maeve knocked, left the tray, and sat down in the hallway to eat the other slice. The door stayed shut for another hour.
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