Free Fathermucker by Greg Olear

the interior giving off an odor, faint but foul, best described as a Mayor McCheese fart. And that’s just from the past week; I spent forty-five minutes vacuuming the car out last Friday.
    So: the usual chaos, getting them to the minivan , to the impossible-to-be-more-appropriately-named Odyssey. Fifteen minutes or so to cool them both down, Maude locked in her room, banging on the door, yelping like a caged animal, Roland in my lap in the glider, both of them crying for their mother. I squeezed him to calm him, balance out the sensory input. Like wrapping him in a blanket to set the heat at a more constant rate. Then, when we finally made it downstairs, Roland put on Maude’s shoes, and Maude put on his . . . and then mine . . . and then Stacy’s knee–high snow boots. All of which is funny enough, downright adorable if you’re in the right mood, a low-grade Mack Sennett act—certainly they both found it riotously funny—but not when I’ve been up since five and I’ve still somehow managed to be late getting out the door. When they finally have the proper footwear on, Roland decides that he’s hungry, even though he’s already eaten an entire bagel, half a box of dry cereal, and a good pint of milk. When I turn my back to fetch two bags of Pirate’s Booty—a snack food manufactured by Robert’s American Gourmet that is said to be healthy but could, for all I know, contain some highly addictive chemical compound whose eventual release into the bloodstream of children across America will herald the initial phase of some nefarious plot to take over the world; it is Pirate’s Booty, after all—Maude’s done something to spark Roland’s wrath. I’m not sure what, but it could range from hitting him to pushing him to standing there minding her own business, as Roland’s fits are Pompeian in both their unpredictability and their fury. So they’re both upset, again, and the Pirate’s Booty, booty though it may be, isn’t sufficient treasure to console them, so I have to break out the big guns to lure them to their carseat confinement. Who wants a lollipop? Like an incantation, a magic spell. Dum-Dum-bledore. No more tears. They’re in the back now, strapped in, slurping hypnotically. Too much sugar for the morning, yes, but once the boy is at school, it’s not my problem. Roland flips through the “car copy” of his Field Guide —the aforementioned remains of the first purchase of said book—and Maude clutches tightly her precious stuffed froggie, a glazed look on her face.
    The popularity of pirates among the preschool set a bottle of rum to fill my tum baffles me. Sure, the eyepatch and Jolly Roger and squawking parrot and the “ahoy, matey” accent have obvious that’s the life for me appeal, as does the swashbuckling strut of the well-mascara’d Johnny Depp. But pirates are thieves, pillagers, vandals, murderers, outlaws— I jumped aboard a pirate ship and the captain said to me the baddest of bad guys. Thomas Jefferson’s administration waged war against pirates; Obama’s has contended with them as well; still they troll the this way that way forward backward over the Somali coast. Yet somehow (the peg leg, perhaps?) the notion persists that pirates are cute. Three-year-olds take up the skull and crossbones for Halloween, and the winsome visage of Jack Sparrow winks from lunchboxes the world over. Two hundred years from now, I wonder, will there be a Serial Killers of the Caribbean ride at Disney World? Will our children attend masquerade parties in rapist costumes? Tasteless jokes, horrible even to contemplate. And yet pirates—for whom murder is part of the job description, and rape a reward for a hard day’s work—are over the Irish Sea let off easy, their abominable behavior tacitly condoned. Never mind that walking the plank is the original form of