Christopher Low

When I was younger my brother and I were constantly fighting. One day, my mother decided to ban swearing. We were at a loss. We stared at each other across the dining room table with enough venom to take out a tiger, but we had no words. I have no idea how it started, but we began to call each other the names of the foods around the kitchen.

"You're such a Quaker, Oatmeal." "You're a can of tuna fish that isn't even dolphin safe." "You're a carton of milk." "You're a half empty bottle of soy sauce. We threw these terms at each other every morning over breakfast and every night over dinner, somehow making the terms more and more apropos to our specific fight.

"You're Tropicana orange juice, some pulp." "You're sour cream." "You're such an apple." "You're a nectarine." "Yea, well, you're a banana." It went on for days.

"You're unpopped popcorn," he would say to me. "You're a frozen chicken," I would shoot right back. "You're cheerios." "You're leftover lasagna." "You're salt." "You're pepper." Towards the end we had to stretch pretty far; we were running out of foods in the kitchen.

It was dinnertime and it was our final battle; we both knew it. He called me a Poptart. I was 15 and I had really bad skin. The red specks of the coating on the Poptart flashed across my face as tears welled up in my eyes. I stood up from the table and with my last ounce of rage I yelled at him, "Well you're a Poptart without frosting, and nobody likes a Poptart without frosting!" I stormed out of the room.

The next day swearing privileges were restored.

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