{five-minute-friday}

A collaboration of writers. A collage of pieces focused on one weekly prompt. A five-minute challenge to write raw and exposed. Completely unedited. Magnificently honest.

This Week’s Prompt:  Doubt

Scattered around us are plastic bits and pieces. Bright yellow legs with pegs waiting to be pushed into catepillar-like bodies. I sip tea and assemble the creatures. My two-year-old rolls, or rather drops, the die. I hand him a piece of bright yellow buck-teeth. Together we push them into the plastic blue face. I hand the die to my four-year-old for his turn.

He drops the die. It lands on five. This is the hard one. This number, his nemesis.

“How many is that?” I ask him. His face furrows, and he extends his index finger to trace the white dots against the red cube.

I see doubt etched into his face.

“One.”

He looks up at me for confirmation.

“Keep going.”

My exasperation grows, and with it, his angst.

He knows this, I know; but he doesn’t. He doubts.

“One, two, three, four!”

He acts as if I don’t know that he has skipped one. He smiles up at me, wills us to move on.

“You missed one”, and I motion back to the die, for him to begin again.

I see his frustration growing. And with each consecutive attempt, he grows more restless. From four to six. We can just never bridge the gap with “five”, it always escapes him.

He knows this weakness, that there’s something he is missing and just cannot gain victory over. And so he stops trying. His doubt stops him in his tracks.

We try a few more times, each time I grow more agitated. I take another sip of coffee, and this time I offer assistance. “…four….five.” I smile. Maybe we’ll continue tomorrow. And maybe today he just needed a hand to hold, and a soft word of encouragement to remind him that doubt must be hushed, if we’re ever to bridge the gap from four to six.