Cooking Your Children
Profitron contains absurd, satirical and funny short fiction. Influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut and Norm Macdonald (all lovers of SEO). Now it’s time for the news:
Many parents view the act of raising a child akin to cultivating a garden. You provide the right environment, nourish appropriately, and when the seedlings sprout you guide the trunks and branches until the plants can survive on their own.
Hope and Richard Lane, however, do not see it that way. In fact they would despise the metaphor. We’ve all walked out one morning, Richard might say, to find some bird or night animal has chewed the leaves, dug the roots, left faeces in the plant beds. There are parasites in the soil too - things that cause rot and blight. If you turn away - even for a second - it’s all over.
To the Lanes, raising a child more accurately resembles being a hand in a frenetic kitchen. Your brow is wet with sweat, your forearms and hands subjected to burns and grease stains. There’s no time - ever - and the stakes are high: nothing short of perfection will do. So when you stand at your humble station before the giant silver pot, it is as though your baby is inside, and you must stir with care and weigh every spice and herb and caress the tiny limbs among the onions and potatoes until the water bubbles and the meal is ready to be plated and served.
Some might say - indeed many do - that Hope and Richard Lane are unorthodox parents, but they don’t care. They love their son. He is all that matters, and if ensuring his success in this unprecedented world makes them odd then so be it. They will leave normal to the dullards and vacants who bestow upon their descendants an inheritance of trauma, stress and waste.
The boy’s name was Crane Lane. He was nine years old and most cute after he had showered and changed into his pyjamas and dressing gown, which he had just done.
In the lounge, Richard and Hope were snuggling on the couch, waiting. With a stopwatch Richard timed the boy’s shower and dressing, while Hope stared at a blank patch on the wall as if there was some drug there that stopped her thinking.
The boy was running late, so Richard pressed play.
The intro acted like a cattle prod. It drove the boy from his room and soon the Frasier theme echoed from somewhere in the house, though it was hard to pin exactly where.
Then the boy burst through the laundry door in his Frasier pyjamas and Frasier dressing gown, and the sight of him appearing unexpectedly caused Hope to shriek in the way you would if a bear lunged from your closet when you reached for a shirt.
Like most nights she laughed off the scream, but a mother’s paleness never lies, even when she does.
Other than pausing the television, Richard ignored the disturbance. He told the boy to sit and pointed at the rug. Crane sipped from the tulip glass of non-alcoholic Beaujolais and sat cross-legged on the rug less than a metre from the television. Then Richard pressed play again.
At that moment they believed life was perfect. The Lanes were in the enviable position of having their lives follow their own design. They were not driven by calamity, desperation, reaction or necessity. Everything was deliberate, planned.
They waited for Hope’s promotion before conceiving to maximise maternity entitlements and ensure Hope’s career continuity. When Hope’s promotion to partner was delayed, the couple abstained from sex for a year to avoid an untimely pregnancy (they were forty at the time).
But finance was only half the equation. The Lanes also needed to be psychologically sound. Richard had to lose the anger and Hope the anxiety, so for two years (three in the end, one sexless) the couple sought counselling, read improvement books and devoured optimisation podcasts. When the boy was born without complications, Richard sprinted the hospital corridors, not out of excitement but so he would reach his scheduled vasectomy on time.
Every generation since homoerectus roamed the plains has been in some way traumatised, whether it be through war, disaster, disease, scarcity or poverty. Crane Lane, however, would be spared that fate. He would not be exposed to any negative or unwanted influences. The Lane household was a fortress, a Wi-Fi-enabled, Bluetooth connected control environment - the ideal environment for raising a child of the 21st century.
Anxiety, anger, depression, mental anguish of any kind were banned. There will be no divorce, no work stress. There will be no affairs, perversions, addictions, processed foods, violent video games, social media… Unsuccessful people were unceremoniously cut, including Richard’s brother, Calvin, and Hope’s sister, Veronica.
If the boy wants to be a ‘sex florist’ he will just have to get there on his own, I say, in his own time, though I see him being utterly seduced by psychiatry perhaps radio or both!
That sanitised environment is why Crane Lane is such a happy and precocious child. He can speak four languages. He can play the violin and bassoon. He is an expert yoga practitioner, meditates ninety minutes a day. He learns social skills from an AI chatbot and eats soup with chopsticks. Hope and Richard dare you to find a higher achieving nine year old boy.
Still, some might ask - indeed many do - well what about cultural understanding? Isn’t the boy a little sheltered? Well you are a fool if you think the Lanes had not anticipated that developmental requirement. Culture is exactly where Frasier (1993-2004) enters the curriculum.
Frasier perfectly encapsulates social nuances and important values like career, family, love, friendship and tenacity. As an example, take that night’s episode - S11E03 (The Doctor is Out).
The shot opens with Frasier prancing into Café Nervosa to find Niles and Marty at a table. On his way to order a coffee Frasier patted his brother on the back. Lesson for Crane: when you see loved ones you greet them with warmth, even in a public setting.
Do you know what happens when a child’s every input is optimised and controlled? That is exactly what Richard wondered as he sat on the goose down couch with his beautiful wife, marvelling at his son, unable to even imagine his future.
On the television, Frasier was dressed in his squash outfit: white shorts, white short-sleeve shirt and a cream vest.
“Ooo! Hello Dad. Hello Niles,” he said.
Sitting on the rug, Crane Lane uttered the line verbatim and in step with Frasier. There was no delay, not a fraction of a second or whatever slice of time it takes for the brain to register. The utterance was identical.
Richard and Hope sat up a little, focused more on the boy.
“Niles,” said Frasier. Crane uttered the line simultaneously again, employing the same shocked tone. “We’re playing squash in twenty minutes,” they continued. “Where are your togs?”
“Oooh,” replied Crane Lane immediately. Now he was embodying Niles. “It’s…” Niles and the boy paused, both searching their minds. “I had to hide them in my briefcase. I told Daphne I was seeing patients all day. It was the only way I could get out of driving her to this flower show - two hours there and back.”
The boy could fluke the initial pleasantries but Niles’ unique excuse was impossible to anticipate. And Richard knew the boy had never seen the episode: the Frasier DVDs were kept in the bedroom safe and the combination changes every six hours.
But the boy kept going, running the entire dialogue and Marty’s interjections and the laugh track without breath or break. He harmonised the show an octave higher.
Richard leapt to his feet, ran his hands through his hair and paced nowhere in particular. He glanced at the rambling boy but turned away each time in disgust, like there was some rotten thing on the rug where once his son, his perfect son, sat.
“Oh no,” he said. “Oh no oh no oh no.”
“Richard,” pleaded Hope. “Richard Richard.”
“Watch your anxiety, Hope! But turn it off, I know. I know. Okay okay. This is fine. This will be fine. I’ll just turn it off.”
He fumbled the remote, caught it on the way down and switched the television off.
For a moment the boy was silent as if the show was still rolling but no one was talking. Then he rubbed his eyes and it all clicked.
Crane Lane let out a horror scream that sounded like the entire cast of Frasier was stabbed at once and their pain was recorded and filtered through nine-year-old lungs. It was a death shriek, a gust from hell, and if you listened you could parse out Bulldog, Roz, even Eddie.
The boy’s shoulders began to pulse like he was operating a jackhammer and the sound and motion caused Richard to retreat. Crane then rolled backwards over his head, uncoiled his spine and took two jagged steps toward them. He left footprints in the plush rug so that it was like three of the boy now squared off against the parents, one turning red and the other two invisible, ominous.
Though he was nine, Crane had long since succumbed to complete male pattern baldness. He also had the hairy chest, wrinkles and pain of an adult. His Frasier dressing gown was pale blue but his bald scalp shimmered like a blood red ocean with beaches of thin hair around the boy’s ears and crown. When he turned to the floor there was nothing left of the boy. There was only the blood red Frasier-child.
In Latin he chanted the Frasier theme. When he crushed the beaujolais glass, droplets of fake wine and blood dived from his cut hand. The parents shook with fear but they dare not speak. They dare not challenge the Frasier-child for he will inherit the Earth.
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Profitron contains absurd, satirical and funny short fiction and prose. Literary influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut and Norm Macdonald. That’s all we have time for, folks.
Do you turn to Frasier for therapy as well as inspiration? Either way it’s working.
Some might say - indeed many do - that they enjoy reading this one.