Just Add Water!

Instant pets! A bowlful of happiness for less than $2.00. Three pouches, along with a fully illustrated manual arrive in the mail. Pouch One trickles like sand into the jar. Just add water, stir and dissolve. Done! Twenty-four hours later, in goes Pouch Two. White egg dots appear and double in size.

My personal troop (nobody taught me the collective noun for sea-monkeys) of eager-to-please underwater clowns will soon be ready to swim and play games. I'll buy a sea-monkey racetrack for them - whoopee! I study the picture on the back page of the comic book. Adorable smiling faces, long ridged tails, webbed feet and triton horns on top of their tulip-shaped heads. Well, yes, the picture is not life-size. I wasn't born yesterday. Lucky I have sharp eyes and a strong magnifying glass.

Each day the eggs grow and develop. Night four comes and I can hardly sleep. I wake up at six and rush over to the jar. Oh, no! There's been a terrible mistake!

I throw the magnifying glass to the floor and collapse on my bed. Instead of sea-monkeys, they had sent me a stupid bunch of tiny swimming men. No horns, or smiles, just ugly bathing suits and goofy mustaches. They refuse my commands and show no interest in playing like seals. In fact, they do not even stay under the water. All they want to do is practice their boring swimming strokes. One even tries to climb out of the jar. I have to rig up some string harnesses to keep them where they belong.

How could this happen? Instant pests instead of instant pets! Human error, no doubt. Could I send the pests back? Reverse dehydration would be tricky. Then I would have to write a letter of explanation. Too much trouble.

I get a break at school. This kid named Sebastian begs me to trade. His snarly sister had forced him to order the x-ray glasses, when it was the sea-monkeys he really wanted. Sebastian is pale and wears thick glasses. Not the revenge-seeking type. No magnifying glass in sight.

"Is it really true? You just added water and they grew?" Sebastian is jittery with excitement.

"Yeah," I say. "They grew like crazy!

No lies there and what he didn't know couldn't hurt him. Well, not much anyway. As long as the pests didn't figure out how to undo the string harnesses. If I was lucky, Sebastian would trip on the way home, the jar would shatter and the pests would get washed into a sewer. Sink or swim!