Stories
My Confession
I am a law-abiding citizen. I follow the rules of the road, observe sprinkling hours and try to obey the
Ten Commandments. But there is one private peccadillo I delight in.
I discovered it when I was about nine years old. I was a timid, compliant child, easily overlooked in a
crowded shop and last to be chosen on a school sports team. It was a secret sin I hugged to myself. No
one need ever know. It was an act of defiance, a bid for freedom from the tyrannies of this world. An
assertion of my true self.
My mother had given me the privilege of making the jelly for our family dinner. This was a job of
considerable responsibility since it entailed using boiling water and resisting the impulse to eat all
the jelly crystals. As I read the directions on the packet, I realized that here was a way of snubbing
authority. If I destroyed the evidence immediately, no one would ever find out. The Aeroplane Jelly
people could hardly check on every packet they sold, could they? Who did they think they were anyway?
I made the jelly without spilling a drop or eating any crystals. Quickly, I dropped the packet into the
kitchen tidy bin. It landed on the side on which was printed in bold commanding letters:
"Open other end."
And to this day I have always opened packets from the wrong end!
MAMALADE
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