Moodswing - Poisoned fish

I’d just like to state for the record that I didn’t deliberately try to poison my mother when I was 6. I know sometimes I sound like I was Lucifer’s little minion growing up, what with the fact that I had a pack-a-day smoking habit by the time I was 12 and that once, when I was very young, like 5, I killed a puppy with a tennis racket, but you have to let me explain this stuff.
For example, the cigarette addiction was just a natural extension of my heritage, since both my parents puffed like living chimneys and by the time I was a year old, I already had lungs that looked like two used tea bags. I remember once my brother accidentally ate a cigarette ash and spent the rest of the afternoon rubbing his tongue on the carpet under the coffee table to get the taste out of his mouth. That’s just how our house was; so steeped in smoke you could send signals. I didn’t even have to buy my own cigarettes; I just filched them from the cartons my parents kept strewn about the house. That my parents didn’t notice is just testimony to the hugeness of their own habits (I quit at 13). That they died young should not have been a shock ... it was anyway, of course, but shouldn’t have been. For the record, I didn’t have anything to do with it.
And the puppy. It’s not like I hacked it to death. Jesus God, get that out of your mind. The puppy was from a litter our dog Echo birthed under the big wooden desk in my brother’s bedroom. One day I thought it would be fun to place one of them on the end of a tennis racket and flip it like a little furry pancake, but I stopped as soon as my brother demonstrated to me how the puppy wasn’t enjoying it by beating me over the head with a can of artificial snow. “When puppies whine that means they’re crying,” he said, “like how you cry when I do this.” Thwack. Weeks later the guy who adopted the puppy came back and demanded another one because the first one was faulty on account of how it died days after he brought it home. I always blamed myself, thinking it never fully recovered from the flipping, though for all we knew the man was taking the puppies straight from our house to a cosmetics testing facility. So it’s possible I had nothing to do with that death either.
With such enlightenment you could almost talk yourself into believing that I was an ideal child if not for the time when I was 6 and I gave my mother, as a present, poisoned fish wrapped in toilet paper. That my intentions were good is only slightly less incredible than the fact that my mother understood them to be so and therefore didn’t mete out her harshest punishment, which was to shove my whole head into a kitchen sink full of soapy dishwater until I coughed for air.
I had collected the fish, dead and floating, from a polluted tributary behind the park after I overheard my parents arguing about money. My father had quit his job again, and my mother was between contracts, and there was no money to put food on the table, she said. Later I presented the fish, wrapped in paper from the public toilet, to my mother. “Food for the table,” I said proudly.
My mother was never one to cry much — except once when I returned home after she had officially reported me missing due to the fact that I had stopped at the cinema on my way home to watch My Fair Lady, a movie about five days in duration — and she didn’t this time, though I was worried she would when I saw her face as I handed her the dead fish. Instead, she gently took the fish straight from my hands to the trash pail and thanked me graciously as she washed my palms. Absent any alcohol to kill the germs, she opted to rinse my hands with warm water and lighter fluid. I swelled with self-importance at the officious undertaking, as I noticed that she took extreme care to first extinguish her cigarette.