Week 1 Storytelling: If You Sneeze on a Monday...

Picture of young boy sneezing. Web Source: Allegra

             When Lonnie was five he began to associate the looks on his mother’s face to his own actions—specifically his sneezes. It didn’t make a lot of sense at first, and honestly he thought himself crazy at the beginning, but as time passed he began to grow firmer in his belief that his sneezes actually influenced the way his mother treated him and acted for the rest of the day.

It began on a Monday, as all bad things tend to, and it was the first time that Lonnie realized that he might actually be different. The jury was still out on whether or not this different was bad or good, however, and until he decided he liked to think of himself as simply unique, as someone who had a very weird, very oddly specific super power. Kind of like a much lamer superman. It worked for him, mostly because for a majority of the time he managed to forget about it—except when he couldn’t.

This Monday was different for a majority of reasons. Although Lonnie thought himself to be some type of sneeze seer he actually didn’t sneeze that often. So when he sneezed first thing Monday morning while sleepily walking down the stairs he didn’t really think anything of it—until he walked into the kitchen and saw the abject terror written on his mother’s face from where she stood by the oven faithfully making him his morning bacon.

“Hey Ma.”

He plopped himself down into a random seat at the table and then immediately froze.

“Uh, Mom? Are you okay?”

She managed to gesture wildly with the spatula in his general direction and sputter out a mangled “Lonnie.” Her voice weakly cracking at the end, “It’s a Monday.”

Okay, so it took him a little bit longer to catch up with what she was indicating than he was openly proud of admitting, but mornings were not always nice to him and they both knew it.

Added to the fact that his mom had never actually come out and specifically said that she understood what was going on, Lonnie was kind of just winging it. I mean he was twelve now, was he ever going to get the answers he was looking for? Was he the newest in a long line of sneezing seers? Was his mom one? Had his dad been one? He had come to terms with the fact that he would probably never know, or find out, because his mom had never explicitly come out and acknowledged that anything outside of the norm was occurring. Until today that is.

“It’s a Monday, baby. So I need you to promise me that you’re going to be extra careful at school today.” She breathed out, finally setting the spatula down and twisting to turn the oven off behind her. “I’m only going to tell you this once, okay? You’re my big man now and I need you to try extra hard to remember this for me. I love you and I want you to know everything you can about yourself, and our family.”

She moved to sit next to him at the table, pulling his chair to face her, it scraping eerily across the floor as she pulled, and took his face into her soft, warm hands. She looked him in the eye and quietly began to sing, a look of fear present in her eyes,

“IF you sneeze on Monday, you sneeze for danger;

Sneeze on a Tuesday, kiss a stranger;

Sneeze on a Wednesday, sneeze for a letter;

Sneeze on a Thursday, something better;

Sneeze on a Friday, sneeze for sorrow;

Sneeze on a Saturday, see your sweetheart to-morrow.”

            After she finished, she brushed her right thumb across his cheek and stood back up, walked over to the stovetop and began shoveling bacon onto a plate.

            “So, just to get this straight, I definitely do have super powers, don’t I?” She set the plate down in front of him and sighed.

            “Lonnie, you have to realize that the issue is much deeper than that. This has been in our family for generations, and it is generally considered a curse.” She picked a piece of bacon off of his plate and began breaking it into little pieces distractedly. “You have to be careful, Lonnie. It’s a Monday and danger comes in many different shapes.”

            The crumbs fell to the table and Lonnie caught a glimpse of his future—sitting his own kid down one day after something as innocent as a sneeze. Singing this exact song to them, praying for the danger to pass, praying for the days to change, praying for better news, but ultimately ending in sorrow, praying for tomorrow. Only for it to cycle on for forever.
             Lonnie brushed the crumbs to the floor and tried to smile. Leaned into his mom and closed his eyes. “So definitely not a super power then, huh?”

Author's Note:
This story was based off of the nursery rhyme "If you sneeze on a Monday..." The poem details what sneezing on different days of the week symbolizes. I chose this poem because I was very intrigued by how such a small thing, a little tiny sneeze, could supposedly predict danger, or love, or even sorrow. Not only that, but the sneezes became an issue of importance to the people. No longer was it such a small thing. What had once been inconsequential was not a day, if not life, altering omen. It had a large range of meaning and I thought that was really cool. We don't often pay much attention to sneezing, but at some point in history some person was intrigued enough with sneezing to write a whole nursery rhyme about it. 
I didn't really know where I was going to go with this story, but it definitely turned out a little more serious than I was anticipating. All I could think about after I first read this Nursery Rhyme was that there was some kid out there who thought he was the coolest for having an out there super power, and it kind of evolved into whatever this turned out to be. 
Also, it is so hard to find a good illustration of people sneezing.

Bibliography:
The Nursery Rhyme Book, edited by Andrew Lang and illustrated by L. Leslie Brooke (1897). The Nursery Rhyme Book