cimorene

you can think of this as epistolary fiction, except that it is the utter and unvarnished truth.

it all started the day my family arrived home from vacation when i emailed my mom, my dad, and my sister simultaneously.

princess cimorene to cuddlepint, daddy, mommy Jun 30 (2 days ago)
i'd love to hear about what happened to you on vacation.

innocuous, right? wrong. i got the first response almost immediately.

cuddlepint to me Jun 30 (2 days ago)
nothing much...

like, what, are you kidding?

princess cimorene to cuddlepint Jun 30 (2 days ago)
well, there were a few days in there that i don't know anything about... .

cuddlepint to me Jun 30 (2 days ago)
right, well... we didnt do anything.

princess cimorene to cuddlepint Jun 30 (2 days ago)
i didn't think you had taken in a lot of tourist sights, obviously, but i know that things happened, because mom eventually talked to me on a phone and daddy's not still in the hospital, and all of you are no longer in france.

the next response i got was an entire page from my mom, which i won't reproduce here, but it conveys some information, like the fact that they were held up for hours in airport lines by employees who didn't know what to do with power wheelchairs and also that they missed a flight in there. meanwhile...

cuddlepint to me Jul 1 (1 day ago)
we hung out in the hospital. daddy got released. we flew home. that's about it. pretty boring... ♥

okay, well, at least at this point i was no longer desperate for details. then i got an email which i at first took for abstract poetry from my dad - he sends me abstract poetry fairly frequently, so that wouldn't have been that strange. it took me a bit to realise it was a letter from mom.

my parents' joint e-mail address to me
It is possible more things could have gone wrong.
i remembered I had brought a sausage, so they tookl it form me at customns
to incinerate ity, but bnI forgot the pate do canard gras, which would
have been a 50 THOUSAND DOLLAR fine if they had discovered it. Dad
could have been ill again. Etc.

formatting preserved, there. after a bit of "what does that even mean?" and appreciation - i still think it could make a good poem - i got an email on the same subject from dad.

dad's personal e-mail to me Jul 1 (22 hours ago)
... then, Mom forgot that she had bought sausages at the Monoprix to take back. This is the kind of dried sausage that doesn't even need to be refrigerated. Sort of the French version of the Mexican version of a Slim Jim. So she didn't put it on the declaration but then she remembered and told the customs person that so they had to pull our luggage out of line is go through it. they only went through her suitcase. Then they had to take the sausage and burn it. nice to know that we're safe from prepackaged French food. That made us miss our flight in Atlanta because they had already used up the entire available time on other typical bureaucratic crap. ...

i wrote dad back that it was fortunate the pate had survived and nice to hear his detailed account of the same events mom mentioned.

princess cimorene to dad's personal e-mail Jul 1 (17 hours ago)
...perhaps even more amusing than all this is that cuddlepint also answered my email, but she just told me that nothing happened. ...so on the one hand, we have cuddlepint thinking flying home was pretty boring and not even remembering that you missed one of your flights or that mom's luggage was rifled and part of it INCINERATED. on the other, you have mom's, well, abstract poetry. ...

this ~~morning~~ afternoon i woke up to this in my inbox - from dad's personal email address.

dad's personal e-mail to me Jul 1 (14 hours ago)
i dont want to kmnow what mean things you say about me and mommy. i was tired.
dont email me again until you can be nice.

o_O daddy, how your email habits have changed! evidently,

cuddlepint hasn't even noticed that she's answering someone else's personal email. i can't decide if this is more amusing or alarming. it's definitely more amusing that she's apparently in training to be tezuka - she thinks mom's page-long saga of mishaps amounts to "we flew home. that's about it"... and doesn't see the slightest humour in that.

oh, family. ^__^ ~~wouldn't it be hilarious if my sister actually did turn out like tezuka?~~