Your mother, magic wand

I sneak out of my room, on a mission. A mission for Cheetos. This mission requires stealth and agility, both things I have in spades, honed over the course of my career as a 28 year old man who really doesn't want another lecture on why he should get a real job (even though fan translations for Patreon money is totally a real job, I just need to get bigger clients), and why he doesn't have dinner with the family more.

At this time of night it shouldn't be too hard. Dad goes to bed early because he has to get up at 4 for work and Carrie is probably in her room watching some dumb teen show that she should have grown out of back in high school. Mom is the only risk, but she's probably working on her next kids book, which would mean she'd be in her study drawing with headphones on.

I sneak down the stairs, counting them so that I can avoid the creeky ones, sneak through the hall and past Carrie's cracked open door and into the kitchen. Crap! Busted!

Mom sees me and smiles. "Hey John come look!" She's standing over a long, skinny box, running a kitchen knife down the tape. Mom is a woman many might refer to as "jolly." Stocky, short, and chubby with messy brown hair that never seems to be able to be managed correctly. She's got deep smile lines next to her mouth and is known to be cheerful by the world at large.

I inherited her messy hair, which I managed by keeping it short, but aside from that most of my features come from my dad. I'm tall and thin and still feel fairly awkward in my body.

I walk over to the kitchen table to look into the box. In it is a very pink magic wand. I can tell it's a magic wand because of the big plastic star on the end and the filmy pink ribbons streaming out from the base of it. "It's a wand," I say to fill the silence.

"Yeah, exactly! This is the prototype, but hundreds of these should be sold with my new book. It's about a little girl who discovers a fairy kingdom full of magic. She finds the only magic wand, which can do anything as long as her spells are in rhyming couplets." She picks up the wand and twirls it around. "These are going to be so much fun."

"Isn't that a little bit gimmicky?" I ask. "Your books have never needed toys to sell before."

Mom shrugs. "I guess it is a little, and that's probably how the publisher looks at it. I just think it'll be fun for kids to wave the wands and do Meriam's spells with her," she says with total sincerity. It's hard to be skeptical around her.

"You're probably right," I agree. It's hard to be skeptical around her. "Excuse me, I was just grabbing the Cheetos."

"You're dang right I'm right." She says. She turns on her heels to face the pantry. She waves the wand in a figure-eight and encants "with this new wand that I think is neat-o, I'm gonna get my son all his Cheeto." The star at the end of the wand glows.

"Oh, it lights up too?" I ask.

"It's not supposed to," she murmurs, when the door to the pantry opens on its own and the bag of Cheetos float toward me, dancing through the air.

"No way," we both say simultaneously. I turn toward my mom who is no longer smiling. She has an expression on her face that I've never seen before on her. It takes me a second to recognize it as lust.