Starfish at McDonald’s
A fan favorite from my book, Trash Mermaid, coming soon to print and ebook.🌊
I was going to take care of it. That was always the plan. My tiny starfish in a Solo cup.
I smiled down at it as I carried it carefully, sloshing in its sea water, drawn freshly from the ocean, now on our way to McDonald’s for a Happy Meal.
“I will take care of you,” is what I told the little creature with my grasping hands, careful footsteps and wide eyes.
My parents let me keep it. And why wouldn’t they? It didn’t bark. It didn’t bite. It took up no space.
Which toy should I get in my Happy Meal? I surveyed the options with laser focus, my head tilted all the way back to study the display case above me. I kept my starfish in its red Solo cup clutched close to my chest, resting it above my small, but promising, potbelly.
The thing with these Happy Meal toys was that you couldn’t just keep getting the “Little Mermaid” over and over because that’s not how you “collect them all.” It was understood, among the pre-K crowd, that you might have to choose a non-Ariel toy sometimes, for variety’s sake.
The starfish in the Solo cup made it to the table. I clambered up on my elbows to gaze in at it while I sipped my Coke. It didn’t look as happy without the sand around. The inside of the cup was so smooth and empty. I wondered if it missed its friends. Ah well, I would be its friend now!
I ate my 4-piece Chicken McNuggets in the particular way that my best friend Sarah Sommers always ate them. She ate around them in circles. It’s not how I would have done it, but I wanted more to be like Sarah than I wanted to eat a McNugget in my own way.
I took out my toy: A plastic packet containing little mice characters from Rescuers Down Under, which was not technically a “boy movie” because Sara B. liked it. Lily H., too. It was okay to like it. And I did.
We left. My favorite place to sleep, even today, is in the backseat of the car as my parents drive.
I jerked awake in my car seat.
Where was my baby starfish?!
Sipping coffee in the driver seat at sunset, Mommy Margie says, as if she’s reading the very last bedtime story, 🥱 “Oh no, did you leave it at McDonald’s?”
👀… ....? ! ????!!!!!!
It was UNTHINKABLE.
The starfish was SO SMALL and the Solo cup SO BIG and who would see it and realize it was mine and alive and a treasure?
First, I felt the personal loss, but then I felt the murder. I should have left it in the ocean! I tried in vain to think of scenarios in which the starfish would be rescued.
I should never have taken a baby away from its home, especially if I was not even going to be its mother. It was a terrible awakening.
And what had been the plan even if I did get it home?
My moms both comforted me by explaining that it would have died anyway.
WELL, THAT WAS NOT THE GOAL.
WHAT A HORRIFIC MISCOMMUNICATION.
When my creative faculties returned to me, I chose to imagine a friendly child coming by with her fries, seeing my pet, and taking it home to her saltwater aquarium that was exactly the correct PH level to sustain a lonesome baby starfish from Jones Beach.
And.
That is exactly what happened.
The starfish is big now, thriving. Great job, beautiful family. I have no regrets. The end.
(😭)