Mothballed

Here’s something I wrote once, long ago. It came to me when I misheard something my aunt said. For a while I thought she’d turned into Willy Wonka’s stockbroker. Figured it’d make a good ‘virgin’ post since it’s the first thing I ever wrote on my own.

“Jellied Eels”
As a little boy, I had a marked fondness for jelly. I even developed the rather peculiar habit of quantifying all the little-boy transactions I engaged in at the time using this sweet conserve as the currency. ‘Jelly Deals’, I called them. “Hey Tim”, I would say at some point, “If you help me beat up Charlie, I’ll give you some of my Jelly. As was typical of such arrangements between boys we would then engage in some of haggling or other involving the quantity of jelly in question as well as other minor details such as what flavours the said jelly was available in. Two little things; Charlie was bigger than the both of us put together and Tim was not renowned for his prowess in matters pertaining to physical combat. I really ought to have taken the hint that Tim probably had jelly for brains. Usually, I happened to be unavoidably detained and thus unable to keep our appointment with Charlie. Maybe that could could have you calling me a jelly-belly. Tim, (bless his heart) would keep the said appointment, to his detriment and get a black eye for his troubles. Since the encounter would render him indisposed, I would then be faced with the heavy burden of disposing his jelly for him. However, it is noteworthy that as our business relationship matured Tim had the foresight to require payment in advance whereupon getting him to hold up his end of the deal became as easy as nailing jelly to a wall. I then decided that Tim had become something of a spineless jellyfish and that marked the end of all jelly deals between us.
My next partner in matters jelly was of a more unusual sort. She was a girl, I suspect she still is. The only jelly that stood between me and her was to be found in my knees. Those treacherous appendages would turn to mush and unabashedly knock together at the merest thought of this enchanting creature. She was my jelly-baby. What then happened between us is a tale for another day.