One Shining moment

This is a piranha plant from the Mario games. (Was that too much information about a minor character from a video game? I can't really tell anymore.) It's a Red Baron pizza with a slice of Genoa salami and provolone, broccoli, cucumber for the stem and stars and lettuce leaves (the first harvest from our garden this year!)
 
Sometimes my schedule dictates that I make these lunches after I drop primo off in the morning. When that's the case, Secundo usually gets an episode or two of Blue's Clues to keep him occupied. His shouted demands for juice and responses to the television's questions limit the need for me to check on him, too, so I end up reasonably free to concentrate.

As I was working on this one, though, I caught something in the corner of my eye and looked up. Secundo stood there, smiling and staring for a moment, and then walked backward out of the kitchen, never breaking eye contact. And he only did it once. He didn't come back to show me the trick again, or start to giggle as he often does when he does something goofy. Just kinda leered and backed out of the room. His smile didn't help. It's not that he has a particularly creepy or menacing smile, but it's like his older brother got to draw it on him. The spacing of his teeth is a little weird, some of them seem sharper than they're supposed to be and he's constantly got his tongue between them. It's actually pretty cute, usually, but waiting, silently, as it was at the top of the stairs when I was bringing a load of laundry up from the darkened basement later on, it was a little freaky. Not pull-out-the-clippers freaky, but freaky.

Maybe some choice babbling would have finished the job. My mother-in-law had a foster kid for a while and one night, while he was maybe three or four, he walked into the living room, looked at one of her guests and said "There's a man in your house. But he doesn't live in your house." It was sing-songy and everything. Then he just went back to playing. Now that was top-shelf. I don't know where that kid is these days, but I know he's not alone.