My Mom Is a Criminal Mastermind

By Jill McKay

Published: May 1, 2009

It was a normal day, the day it happened. I came home from work and greeted my husband Markus with a hug. But then I noticed that he didn’t return the hug because he was too busy staring at a box on the kitchen counter. “What’s that?” I asked.

Voice quivering, he just said, “Look.”

As I approached the strange box, I grew anxious. “What’s in the box? What’s in the box?!” But Markus remained silent. When I lifted the lid of the box and peered inside, I shrieked, “Aplets and Cotlets?! Nooooo!”

After I got over my shock, I noticed the letter that came with the box.

“CONGRATULATIONS on your employment in the State of Washington! In appreciation for your joining the Washington State workforce, we are sending you this box of Aplets and Cotlets, the recently designated ‘State Candy of the state of Washington.’”

“Why would they do that to us?” I cried. “Why does the state of Washington hate us?”

“I don’t know,” Markus said, shaking his head solemnly, “I don’t know.

When I woke up the next morning, the offending box was gone. I tried to get over my experience receiving the devil’s candy by talking to my friends and family about it. They all reacted with horror and sympathy.

But little did I know that one of these sympathetic listeners was actually the perpetrator of the crime: my own mom. I can only imagine that she sat in her volcano lair, typing, copying, pasting, and spell checking her evil creation as lightning flashed around her. Then she took the package of doom to her henchmen at the post office and cackled to herself.

After that she probably went back to her other mom duties like finishing that day’s Sudoku puzzle and giving the cats their flea medicine. And then she waited. Waited for the day her youngest daughter would come home from work and find a box of pure evil sitting on her kitchen counter.