Anna and Adam didn’t agree on much.
“Kids!”
But one thing they would never, ever argue on-
“Kids! Up and at ‘em!”
-was the joy of sleeping in deep and warm on a winter morning.
“KIDS! IT’S TIME TO GET UP!”
But alas, it was spring, and with it came spring cleaning, and with it came their mother’s kind, gentle, warm, reassuring hurricane bellow, and so Adam and Anna shook off the cobwebs, gritted their teeth, and trudged through their ablations in a haze of their own misery until they had metamorphosed into a pretense of presentable.
“Lovely, lovely, lovely,” said Mother, beaming at them. Her arms were already full, every hand occupied with a different project. “You know the drill, don’t you? I don’t have to tell you twice? Go on! Get it done! Do what you do best! Shoo!”
And so urged on and on they were laden with products and tools and solutions and kicked out the door, and though they ignored each other and made no small talk so as to make the journey take as much time as perceptibly possible, at last, inevitably, the dread conclusion lay in sight at long and gruesome: the wide and vast woodlands, just-thawed, still-damp, and ready for change.
“Damn I hate spring cleaning,” groaned Anna, burying her face in her hands.
“YOU hate it?” retorted Adam, already elbow-deep in a bucket of loose buds. “All you have to deal with are the animals. I’m up to my eyebrows in plants.”
“At least yours stand still! And animals includes lots of stuff; you ever heard of bugs – I mean, you ARE one, so-”
“At least yours are low-effort! Every tree needs every leaf set up and running! You just have to poke all the groundhogs awake and call it a season!”
“Oh please! You only think my job’s easy because you couldn’t tell a groundhog from a wild hog! A blind baby could do your job! And do it faster!”
Adam smiled at his sister in that particular little tight-lipped way she never tired of pointing out was entirely stolen from their mother. “Prove it, you blind baby.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Do my stupid lame easy moron job that a blind baby could do, and do it better than I can. Go on. Try your best. It should be easy, right?”
Anna grinned at her brother in that particular too-many-teeth way that he always insisted was just mom’s Winter Face. “Sure. Dead simple. And YOU, of course, can definitely pick up my slack since you’ll be doing my job, and doing it very well and making no mistakes at all and finishing it super fast. Since it’s so easy, right?”
“Right!”
“Right!”
Agreement reached in all good cheer and venom, they departed, then returned and swapped tools without making eye contact or saying anything above a mutter, then departed again.
***
“This will be easy,” said Adam to himself as he walked through the woods, banging on the tree-trunks and drumming on the burrow-holes. “Hoy! Birds of the air and beasts of the field! Get up! Get going! Wakey wakey time’s-a-wastey!”
A blackbird scuttled down to a lower branch to trill at him reproachfully. He swooped it up in his hand and scoffed. “Look at you! It’s spring and you haven’t even sprouted yet – oh, my sister REALLY never even tried with you. Let’s get your colour going. Is it this one – yes, it must – oops.”
The blackbird fled to a nearby tree, dripping bright red paint from both wings and scolding him mercilessly.
“Well, that was just an honest mistake. Who brings red paint for fresh buds, anyways – what a weirdo my sister is!” He bobbled the bucket in annoyance, carelessly sloshing it all over a cardinal that had been picking stray seeds from his shoes. “Oops. Are you not being fed and watered enough, that you have to do that? Honestly, she really is a lazy pill. Well, I’ll get things fixed up around here, don’t you worry. Where are some better colours?”
So Adam rummaged through Anna’s paints and spent a good while shaping up the birds for the spring, with many a mumble, slip of the brush, and “who keeps THAT colour around anyways?” excuse. But he was running out of paint and birds and excuses for errant splashes, so he took a moment to pull the checklist out of the duffle bag and scoff at it.
“Humdrum claptrap bullshit,” he sneered, carefully running his eyes over every entry. “’Remove Winter Fur’ – ha! I’d like to see her remove autumn leaves! I can finish this in a single second!” And so, with the utter confidence of the completely self-aware, Adam reached one-handed into a burrow and extracted a groundhog, which bit him.
“Fuck! Mean thorns on you, little nettle. Now let’s – oh my sweet pumpkin seeds, LOOK at you! You’re absolutely LOADED DOWN with last year’s growth! Well, we can fix THAT I hope!” And thus saying, Adam produced his (private, personal) hedgetrimmer from his pocket and began to work on fixing that.
“Stop squirming, please,” he muttered, over the indignant squeals. “Working on such irregular and stubby limbs is very hard even without them moving windlessly. There! That’s not so bad, is it? You’re nice and ready for your fresh foliage. Git! G’won! Who’s next?”
His question went unanswered, his audience remained slumbering in their dens.
“Honestly,” sighed Adam, rolling up his sleeves and jamming his arm into a hollow stump, where it contacted squirrels. “Oh, why do you all have to make such a simple thing so COMPLICATED. Oh! Shelf fungus. Is that an animal? Well, it certainly isn’t a plant, so it must be an animal. Let’s get you trimmed!”
***
“This’s going to be easy as hell,” mused Anna as she strolled through the woods, juggling her brother’s canvas backpack from hand to hand. “Look at this shit! It’s just standing there in the open, right ready for it! Hey trees, catch!” And so saying, she turned the bulk of the pack inside out and vigorously shook all the buds inside out into the air, where they flitted about and landed on pretty much everything but what she was aiming at.
“Wow, looks like SOMEONE didn’t bother to make you all aerodynamic,” said Anna, shaking her head in dismay. “This is what not looking at the birds’ll get you. Guess it’s up to me to set things straight here.” And so saying, she picked up the buds and stuck them to the sides of the trees, where they wouldn’t be so exposed and fragile.
“Why he insisted on putting you guys on the tippy-tips of the wimpiest little twigs on these things, I’ll never know,” she said, shaking her head in dismay (and spraying pollen everywhere).
“ANYWAYS, what’s next on the menu? Flowers? Eergh, he’s let them get all infected and rotten, look at the colours! What a wasteful boor!”
So Anna buried the rotten old colourful flowers, took her brother’s big vat of green paint, and set them all up more sensibly.
“Everyone knows plants are green,” she said to herself as she diligently worked over a fallen log. “Everyone except my big smart clever BROTHER, apparently – and why would he know, it’s not like they’re his JOB or anything, no no no, better not try to learn what he’s doing there, why bother when he can leave it ALL to his sister to do it properly. He’s never going to hear the end of this one. Hey, are mushrooms plants? Pretty sure they’re plants. Well, they’re not animals, so they’re probably plants. Hold still for your touch-up!”
***
The sun set eventually, much to its great relief. It wasn’t sure if it could take much more of this. In the long slow shadows of its descent the two siblings met in the woods. Each held their head high.
“Done and done,” smirked Adam.
“Dead simple,” mocked Anna.
“Why you ever thought you could get away with claiming this took even a single snot of skill or effort is beyond me,” said Adam. “Behold! The birds of the air and the beasts of the field!”
“They’re woodland animals, you – oh my FUCK! What did you DO to the birds!?”
“I put them in spring colours – lavender, violet, and so on,” said Adam. “So the bees can fertilize them with pollen. Obviously. Admittedly, their petals were a little trickily-shaped, but-”
“Oh dear deer you PAINTED them?” Anna clawed at her hair like a drowning ape reaching for oxygen. “Feathers aren’t flowers! Feathers aren’t flowers at ALL!”
“Well they’re close enough,” said Adam loftily. “And anyways, I think they look pretty good now. Except for the goose, I couldn’t decide what looked best on it, so I tried a bit of everything. The leaves look fine, I think.”
Anna gently cradled the goose, ignoring his (exhausted) attempts to twist the flesh off her arms and examining every square inch of the bouquet he had transformed into. “Wings.”
“What?”
“They’re not leaves. They’re wings.”
“Oh, what’s the difference.”
Anna looked up with the expression of someone who had seen the face of Satan in their breakfast toast. “What’s the DIFF- OH MY FUCK WHAT THE HELL IS THAT WHAT IS THAT WHAT DID YOU DO?”
Adam’s brow furrowed, gently at first then with escalating concern as he followed his sister’s trembling arm and outstretched finger. “A bear?” he replied tentatively.
“Why is she BALD?”
“Well, I had to trim off the old growth,” explained Adam reasonably. “Since SOMEONE let all the mammals keep their foliage after last autumn instead of shedding it properly, like they’re supposed to. Look how the fresh air is shaking her branches!”
“She’s SHIVERING you VACUOUS DIPSHIT oh my SHIT I am GOING to MURDER you TWICE, ugh ugh ugh ugh UGH!” wailed Anna, stamping her feet in an agony of dismay.
“I don’t see why you’re being so fussy over a few extraneous extremities,” said Adam. “It’s not like they were living tissue or anything, like is that a flower?”
“Fur is NOT FLOWERS, you TREMENDOUS-”
“What you’re standing on. Is that a flower?”
Anna looked down and lifted one boot experimentally. “Yeah,” she said, the seething hate gently, carefully pushed aside for the sake of very patiently answering a very dumb question from someone she knew to be very stupid.
“What kind?”
“You tell me if you’re so smart.”
“Is that a daisy?”
“Sure, why not.”
“Why is it green?”
“Because it made more sense than it being like, pus white and bruise yellow? It’s a plant, dude.”
Adam swallowed his tongue before the scream escaped, then coughed it back up. “Green.”
“Plants are green. Duh.” She pointed at a patch of bluebells. “Green.” She pointed at a nearby toadstool. “Green.” She pointed at the nearest tree – a sturdy birch. “See? Green. You’re welcome. I guess SOMEBODY had to fix that eventually.”
“Why are its buds sprouting on the trunk.”
“So they don’t fall off? Double duh.”
Adam didn’t swallow his tongue in time, and the howl that escaped him sounded like it had been retrieved from the bottom of a trapped jaguar’s lungs. “Did you do ANYTHING right you – you DIPSHIT?! Don’t you know your precious animals need to eat plants to LIVE?!”
“Uh, yeah, triple duh,” said Anna. “I did all the berries. See?”
Adam desperately crawled into the midst of the thicket he was directed to, hands trembling and a fleck of spittle sliding down his chin. “These are raspberry bushes,” he said at last.
“Sure.”
“Why are they sprouting blueberries.”
“Well, it’s not a big difference.”
Adam plunged into a second patch. “These are blueberries. And they’re growing strawberries.”
“Yeah? I ran out of blueberries.”
“And where,” demanded Adam, plodding free of the patch, vines over his shoulders and desolation in his eyes, “Are. The. Raspberries.”
“Where do you think they are? In the maple trees.”
At this Adam lashed out his fist into his sister’s brisket, but Anna’s autonomous nervous system had been tense as a wire since she laid eyes on the goose and it counteracted with a knee to the groin, followed by applying said goose to Adam’s nose. Adam’s free hand stuffed poison ivy down the back of Anna’s shirt and it all continued as it thus began, but moreso, and moreso, and moreso, and moreso, until at last Mother heard the ruckus from clean across her globe and came downstairs to separate, investigate, and interrogate.
“I told you,” she said in her most severe and wintery tones, a child in each hand, “to do what you do best. This scarcely seems it.”
“ANYONE could do what they do best!” Anna and Adam agreed violently, pointing bitten and scarred fingers at the other.
“Oh,” said Mother. “I see my mistake. You’ve done exactly what you do best together, it just isn’t anything useful. Well, what’s done is done. Time to fix it.”
And they did, and it took as long as you thought and was as tedious and frustrating as you’d imagine, but in the end spring – reluctantly, slowly, gradually – sprang, and everything was as it was intended to be.
But no matter how long she made them scrub, they never could get the red paint off those two birds.