Brad Snyder: TOGETHER • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Brad Snyder
TOGETHER

My four-year-old son likes to Scotch tape everything.

He tapes napkins, light switches, and water bottles. He once taped a bagel and cream cheese. Yesterday, he tried to tape the cat. I scolded him, he cried, and I felt bad about that.

He tapes our hallways from end to end. Sometimes, our dog sees the tape and stops in his tracks, not knowing what to do. I must carefully raise the tape like a drawbridge to allow him to pass.

To keep up with my son’s habit, I order Scotch tape online in sets of six. I think, This should last a couple of weeks. It lasts two days. Occasionally, I try to set limits on the quantity of his taping. But the broad smile he flashes when presented with a new roll melts my resolve.

My son tapes the freezer door handle to adjacent kitchen cabinets. I am not to ruin the tape by opening the freezer. This makes it hard to grab a pint of ice cream, a point he’ll reluctantly negotiate about. He tapes my sweater, front and back, with me in it. He wants to tape the television screen, but has been met with a hard No. He tapes the floor, and the tape sticks to my bare feet, or clings to my socks like a stubborn dryer sheet. In November, months after he began taping things, he taped the outside of my husband’s mail-in ballot for a local election. We had to painstakingly peel back the tape to avoid altering the signature and creating a crisis for the board of elections.

My son wants to tape his teenage sister’s electric guitar. So far, Big Sis’s threats of physical retaliation have proven effective. He tapes his Tonka trucks and Matchbox cars. Sometimes, he tapes my wrists together and places me “under arrest” without reading me my rights. He thinks a fairy is responsible for the existence of tape. This makes me notice the word “magic” right there on the tape’s packaging.

The tape can sometimes frustrate him, though. Like when he made the longest continuous piece of tape I have ever seen—the length of the sofa—ignoring my direction that the longest continuous piece of tape I have ever seen will eventually tangle and stick to itself. Or like when he taped his hair to his forehead, which was definitely not a thing to be repeated.

A couple of weeks back, my son turned to me and said with the earnestness of someone who thinks he is delivering news: “I love tape.” I told him, “I’ve noticed.”

Despite his current affection for tape, I know this won’t last forever. I think I am going to miss it. My son wants everything and everyone to stick together.

Brad Snyder’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost Personal, Hippocampus Magazine, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Maine Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Bay Path University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family. You can find more of his writing at bradmsnyder.com.