Burning House reminds Sumac to ask, “So how did PopCorn’s dad set his house on fire, anyway?”
CardaMom and PapaDum look at each other before he answers. “It was the deep fryer. Iain left sausages and fries sizzling away while he took a bath.”
PopCorn can be a bit flakey, Sumac thinks; maybe he got a gene for that from his dad, just like Sic inherited PapaDum’s stinky feet?
“Accidents happen,” chants Aspen.
“Mostly to you,” Sumac points out. The Lotterys call them aspendents, because they tend to leave Aspen dented. Like the Halloween before last, when she suddenly fell off her chair as if she’d been pushed by an invisible poltergeist and fractured her thumb. Only none of her family believed her for three days, because Aspen’s the Girl Who Cries Wolf, always claiming to have broken things.
“Oh, oh, I have a joke about a house,” says Sumac. She’s been memorizing one a day. “Why did the house go to the doctor?” She waits for a count of three, like it said to in the book. “Because he had windowpanes!”
Aspen groans. “Where do jokes go to die? Sumac’s mouth.”
Sumac gives her the evilest scowl.
A clattering, falling sound. “Blocks!” And Aspen races off. At exhibitions, she always ends up at the build-your-own-structure-then-knock-it-down area.
Now Sumac can examine the glass cases in peace, one row at a time, reading each caption so she won’t miss anything. What’s inside is mostly seals — not the marine mammals, but little clay pictures you could seal up envelopes and parcels with, so you’d know if anybody’d opened them.
“Napoleons hads doggies?” That’s Brian, at her side.
“Yeah,” Sumac tells her, “but actually this one’s a fox, and the ones underneath are sheep.”
“Napoleons hads feet?” Brian examines the jagged, muddy toenails sticking out of her own sandals.
“Everyone’s always had feet.”
“Not fishes don’t.”
“Good point,” says Sumac.
There’s a sort of teapot that turns out to be for Mesopotamian beer, which had so much gungy stuff at the bottom that you had to drink from the top through a straw. “Possibly alcohol-free,” PapaDum reads in a disappointed tone.
“They ate date-sweetened crunchy locusts.” Sumac recoils. “Ew!”
“Didn’t you try roast locusts in Cambodia?” PapaDum asks CardaMom.
She nods. “They didn’t taste that different from prawns. It would be great for the planet if we all ate bugs….”
“Double ew,” says Sumac.
Here’s a statue of a king called Ashurnasirpal II that’s no bigger than Sumac: fearsome-looking, with a beard the shape of a book and a sickle to fight demons. Then a model of something called the Great Death Pit, where sixty-eight maids were killed to honor some dead royal. Which strikes Sumac as much more ew than eating locusts. “It says the archaeologists can’t agree on whether the maids volunteered to die or not,” she murmurs to PapaDum.
He taps the diagram. “Notice those six guards stationed at the door. I bet the maids got volunteered with a knife to the throat.”
So volunteer would be another euphemism. (Sumac did look it up after breakfast: It means a polite way of saying something.) There’s another e-u word on the next panel. She reads it out: “What’s a e-u-n-u-c-h?”
“CardaMom?” calls PapaDum. “Toss you for this one?”
Which means it must be an embarrassing question.
But CardaMom’s rushing off to steer Oak away from an ancient mural of people swimming.
“Sumac!” That’s Aspen shouting from somewhere up ahead.
“Somebody go shush her.” CardaMom’s dangling Oak upside down, his favorite position.
“Sumac!” comes the call again. “You’ll love this.”
A group following a tour guide with a mini Japanese flag are staring.
Sumac hurries through the rooms until she reaches Aspen. “Sh!” Sometimes her sister’s like a puppy that hasn’t been house-trained.
But when she reads the panel, Sumac smiles, because it says Accountants Invented Writing.
“Don’t forget to tell Nenita and Jensen next time you see one of them,” says Aspen.
There’s an illustration of the way Mesopotamians wrote, little bird-foot marks in the clay. Jensen and Nenita are accountants, and Sumac’s parents, biologically speaking. They made her by mistake, and they thought they’d be terrible at being a mom and dad, and Nenita was old friends with MaxiMum, so she and Jensen agreed to give Sumac to the Lotterys the day she was born.
“What would you steal?” asks Aspen in her ear, way too loudly. “I’d go for the lion dying with all those arrows stuck in him.”
Sumac winces. “OK, but you’d have to put it in your own room. I’d take … the giant finger with all three hundred and eighty-two of their laws written on it. It’s the first time it was written down that you should assume somebody’s innocent until they’re proven guilty!”